I’ve been wanting Rockstar to remake or create a sequel to their unique Bully game for quite a while. The original shows its age quite a bit now, and it would be nice to get a graphics and gameplay overhaul for it. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like that is going to happen anytime soon. Long past are the days where Rockstar branches out more and does something different, or creates a new game that doesn’t take six or more years to make. That being said, I was intrigued by Agefield High: Rock the School because its inspirations were clear, they were making a Bully styled game.

In Agefield High: Rock the School you play as Sam, who just moved from a big city to a small town. He is trying to assimilate to the ways of a small town and find his footing with the cliques in the school. Of course, being new means you have to deal with the school jock bully and his group of friends trying to ruin your life. Befriending a boy named Axel, he has a plan to take down Seth the jock and throw a huge party to leave his mark on the school.

Uhhh, why is he lookin directly at me when he says this?

On paper this all sounds just fine, and that’s why I was initially really excited to give Agefield High: Rock the School a fair shot. Unfortunately, I did not have the best time with this game. In fact, it’s probably one of the worst I’ve played this year, and I played I Am Jesus Christ. I’ll be upfront in telling you I did not finish the entire game, but it wasn’t from a lack of trying. I’ll be going into more of why the game let me down, but the final straws were all the bugs and crashes I had that set me back sometimes an hour or so of gameplay each time. With that out of the way, let me get into why overall I was not impressed by this title.

First off, I’d like to acknowledge that I know this is an indie project and it’s not fair to try and compare this to a game from Rockstar. It just isn’t going to have the same level of polish, and that’s okay. However, this isn’t 2006, and there are expectations for better looking and running games with how far Unreal Engine has come. From the beginning you immediately get the uncanny valley aspect to the character models. This is overall an issue with Unreal Engine in general, but it doesn’t help that there wasn’t much work into making them look more natural.

Sam looks like if teenage Joe Burroughs was hitting the bong. He is about as expressive as a bong as well.

The main cast is fine looking I suppose, but side characters are not so great. However, it’s not just the overall quality of the models that throw you off; it’s how they speak, interact, and move that make it off putting. During cutscenes and conversations I don’t think the characters ever actually look at each other much. They just move and wave their heads around a lot. It lingers on long off stares with awkward pauses often, and not for comedic timing. Overall, it just pulls you out of the scene because of how strange it all feels.

Outside of the strange character models and animations, the general world of Agefield High: Rock the School looks okay. It’s not the worst thing I have seen, but it’s just kind of boring. It lacks charm or anything really interesting. It’s a pretty standard looking suburban map with some parks, a school, and a small market area. It’s not a big map, doesn’t need to be one, but it just isn’t interesting or packed with enough unique things to make it fun to explore.

The general map looks okay until you start looking at the finer details.

Everything in Agefield High: Rock the School  feels a bit half baked and that goes for the gameplay and quest design. There are a decent amount of missions to do (at least from what I was able to get through), that range from school, friends, or side jobs. However, none of it feels cohesive. There is obviously a focus on school and making your mark, but school just feels like an afterthought. Besides the very few and far between main missions that have you go to school, you don’t even need to attend or go to your daily scheduled classes. There isn’t any repercussions, but the only benefit is that you will earn money. Depending on how well you do in the class, you will earn up to $20 for an A and it drops $5 with each lowered grade.

What kind of school is that? Why does attending school earn you money? I don’t know, it doesn’t make sense, and really neither does having money in general. Main missions, even ones that follow your other classmates, will happen during the day more often than not, and apparently you just skip school all the time. Like I said, there are no repercussions to not going to school. It’s fine though because you aren’t really missing out on anything fun. The minigames are boring, it’s just a series of questions depending on your class. English, Math, and Geography just have multiple choice questions. In the Music class you get to at least play a guitar to a Guitar Hero-styled minigame, but the notes don’t even line up with the music.

These two have never touched a guitar in their lives.

Besides the classroom school activities, the other stuff is lackluster as well. The majority of the missions come down to stalking people, stealth, or just running around to various places. I can’t tell you how many missions where you’re just stalking and watching other characters. Follow Seth home to recover a bike, follow Seth and take pictures of him kissing girls, spike Seth’s party drinks with drugs. I swear, Sam and his friends are more obsessed with Seth than Seth cares about them.

A few other missions involve stalking a husbands wife that he thinks is cheating on him, and stalking a teacher who is peeping at the school girls around town. Or you can deliver food. Even when I thought it was going to do something at least different with a haunted house, that they were ditching school to check out, it just turned into walking around the house and then a short cutscene of a cupboard slamming and them freaking out. Stalking, stealth, and bad fighting are basically most of what you’ll be doing in Agefield High: Rock the School, outside of riding bikes around.

How are these guys still the bullies when I’ve beat up these same dudes like five times at this point.

Honestly, the most fun Agefield High: Rock the School has is riding the BMX bike and bunny hoping over everything. I found it fun to just jump right into pedestrians and cops who don’t really react much other than a “damned kids these days” grumble. There are two types of bikes you can get, fast bikes made for asphalt and concrete that slow down on grass. Or mountain bikes that are fast in the grass, but not so much on the street. Unfortunately, you can’t jump with the mountain bikes, so you’re just stuck riding around like normal. It would have been nice to have some variety like a skateboard or moped or something, but if the cops don’t even have vehicles, why should we?

Yes, there are cops in the game, but they are kind of pointless. If you do go around punching strangers, cops will come after you always on foot. It’s very easy to just out run them or hop on a bike and take off. It is funny seeing motorcycle cops walking around the town, but none on an actual motorcycle. Again, just more to add to the under-baked pile of ideas.

Pardon me officer, I seem to be stuck in your hair.

Speaking of punching people, there is combat with basic punching, kicking, pushing, and blocking. You can lock on with holding left trigger, and then just simply smash enemies with the most unsatisfying melee combat ever. You can’t grab people, or kick them when they’re on the ground. Nothing, you just punch and kick until they are done, and that’s it. I never lost a fight, but I have taken damage. You can consume food and snacks by buying them, but it’s pointless since you just regain your life in each mission you start, and they are never long enough or have enough combat to need it.

I played on an i7-12700kf, RTX 5070, and 32gb of DDR5 RAM, and for the most part the general performance was fine. Not that this really should have any framerate issues. It’s not a very good looking game anyway. My main issues came from the general jankiness of the gameplay, bugs, and crashes. There were a few instances where I had to restart a mission because I got stuck behind a door that swung open when I walked by. Since you can’t actually move the doors yourself, I was pinned in the corner by an immovable door. I got stuck on top of a cop’s heads while bunny hoping over them. A few times my bike would clip through objects and send me launching. Besides that, I had two fatal crashes that wiped out hours of gameplay, and that was my final straw to not continue anymore.

Now curtsy and bow.

Sound design continues the trend of not impressing with an overall lack of effort in the voice acting. Some of the line deliveries are just god awful, and it only makes it worse that the script is terrible. I get that some of it is going to be dumb and cliché: that’s what they’re going for in most cases here. It’s just how everything is set up that makes it not land. It’s just overly cringey and with poor execution it comes off as dumb more than funny. The random lines the citizens have around the town are limited, so you’re going to hear the same stuff over and over. I swear if I hear: “men are all the same. Tiny pricks.” one more time, I’m going to crash out. Soundtrack is also not great. There are a small handful of songs that will be repeated constantly. Or you will hear the same ones as cars drive by constantly.

Agefield High: Rock the School is unfortunately not what I was hoping it was going to be. While it tries to replicate and spin-off from a game like Bully, it seriously misses the mark on just about every level. While I can typically forgive lack of production value for indies, its biggest issue is that it just isn’t interesting. It doesn’t try to do anything new, and ends up being a cheap knock-off that doesn’t bring anything unique to the formula via gameplay, story, or silliness. It’s a product that structurally feels like it should be in 2006, but is somehow still worse in many ways. The bugs and crashes were the final nail in the coffin for this frustrating throwback.

Agefield High: Rock the School is available now on PC (Steam).

Reviewed on PC with i7-12700kf, RTX 5070, and 32gb of DDR5 RAM.

A copy of Agefield High: Rock the School was provided by the publisher.