Canis Canem Edit

Time has a funny way of playing with your memories. What was traumatic and meant the world to you in your school days seems cool and nostalgic the longer ago it happened. If you're still studying at high school, perhaps you love it. But equally perhaps - if not more - you loathe it. The lack of freedom, the rigidity, the almost fascistic class structure. The dumb kids. The smart kids. The girls - or lack thereof. There's a reason why so much TV focuses on teens. It's an emotionally turbulent time. It's the period where people appreciate social boundaries and start to fully appreciate the consequences of their behaviour. Where you realise there's a "system", and it's your role to fight it or comply.

Canis Canem Edit (Bully in some countries) is a wry ode to those secondary school years. It's not a schoolkid torture simulator, but rather an attempt to capture that mid-teen period. The final rite of passage before you went off to university, changed the world, or settled into a life of quiet desperation in suburbia. Your high school years. The decisions you made there helped mould the person you became. Did you back down all the time? Did you stand up for yourself? Did you stand over others? Were you a "path of least resistance" type, or one who felt the need to rebel against everything? Whether you subconsciously fought against how you were in school, or whether you became merely an older version of it, it was (or is) your actions in these formative years that defined you as a young adult.

So CCE has got originality going for it. Game companies look at games about school and tend to run a hundred miles, unless that school's name happens to be "Hogwarts". But CCE also nails scale - and this is one complaint some (not all) have had with the GTA series. Obviously the GTA games are fun and all, but it often seemed like you got stretched too thin. In World of Warcraft, you bounce all over the world because there's defined reasons for it - not just buffering you from stuff that's hard work at your current level. In many open world games (I'm looking at you, Just Cause) you often don't really need all that massive scale - half the terrain you might go over a couple of times and that's it.

With CCE, I "get" it - the point of an open world. To use a cliché, for slow on the uptake folks like yours truly, CCE is a case of addition by subtraction. You don't have a game world larger than the Moon to explore, rather a school (Bullworth Academy) and a small town - but there is plenty to see and do. There's not tens of thousands of AI characters, 99 percent of whom speak from a script. Rather there's a good chance the people you run into in CCE are fleshed out characters who you get to know well.

Like any school, life at Bullworth (as prefaced in our preview) does operate to a routine and rules, deviation from which is a risk/reward scenario. If you're desperately trying to finish a mission when you should have turned in for the night, you have to circumvent prefects and teachers who will boot your ass into bed for the night. If you're skipping classes to wander around, you're missing the chance to skill up in key areas, not to mention also drawing more heat. And most importantly, if you do things that are socially unacceptable, you build your trouble meter (think: the star system in GTA) up like nobody's business. The transgressions range from mild (inter-clique fights) through to stuff that really gets you in deep hassle - such as picking on smaller kids. The message is unmistakeable - pick on somebody your own size.

You can't just go around punching on anyway. If a prefect busts you, you still cop it - although if you don't fight back, you can get others into trouble. The good thing is as your rep builds, you wont be fighting people nearly so often, so you get less impediments to traversing the story arc. Combat starts out as being pretty basic, but it too grows with the plot, and you end up with quite an arsenal of reasonably innocent weapons and moves at your disposal. And anyway, you will have a lot more to do than just running around beating people up 24-7.

So why does it work so well? Because there's a strong storyline, great characters, and a jack-of-all-trades approach about the game. You won't finish CCE and suddenly have the skills to own every action adventure game - it's not that sort of experience. Rather, you'll be swept along by the story and interested in seeing how it pans out. This friends, is Rockstar taking one more big solid step towards true interactive fiction, while competitors flounder around creating glorified tech demos.

On the wishlist - a next gen version would be great. This is precisely the kind of title Xbox 360 needs to avoid being tagged as the hard gamer only machine. That's not to say that only casual players will like CCE! Rather, once you get what it’s all about, instead of shrieking that it's a Trenchcoat Mafia simulator (as some of the demented commentators abroad have done) it's really a new beast in gaming - the coming of age story.

Canis Canem Edit is rude at times, but never gratuitous. Rough, but never overly violent. Knowingly smart, but never unrealistically so. True, you need to be willing to put yourself into the right headset here - if you're looking to rip someone's spine out of their backside, you're barking up the wrong tree - but this is by no means a kiddy game. The sly wit and pop culture references within make this eminently playable for everyone from high schoolies through to those of us who can only retain fond memories of Physics and PE. Between our preview and this review, I've avoided spilling too many plot details for a reason - CCE more than any game in recent memory tells a story - and its one you should best discover first hand.

Maybe there's something in the water around here, but I think something truly laudable with what Rockstar have been doing of late. In addition to their now "usual" titles, there's some great risk taking behaviour going on - and it's paying off. Whether it's harnessing the most powerful console on the market to produce a Table Tennis game, or it's using another machine at the end of its lifecycle to produce one of the most startlingly compelling and original stories in recent memory, they continue to show the way forward. Efforts like Canis Canem Edit make you realise that this company is not another "games outfit", but rather a company run by creative, artist-aesthetes. Respect.