Normally, I would wait a while before starting to write up a review of a game I was playing. However, after only the second main mission – and first after the tutorial – I couldn’t wait. My character, Sam, was tasked by his new friends to steal the head cheerleader’s underwear for ‘reasons’. When I returned from her house with said “panties”, I was laughed at for not getting them from the school changing rooms, as if somehow that would have been better?
Yes, this is Agefield High: Rock the School, and I’m not so much poking fun at the puerile humour rooted in early 00’s teen comedies, but more just the whole point of it. As someone who grew up on a diet of American Pie and Harold & Kumar, and will still interject with “at band camp” when someone starts a sentence “This one time…”, I get it. But at the same time, I don’t get it either.
The first thing you will unfortunately notice is just how bad the character models are. They’re not even in the uncanny valley range; they are so far out of it there is a lifelessness to the way every single person looks. We are told there are hot teachers and “moms” a lot in this game, yet they objectively are not.
And then when they speak, everything is thrown further off course. It simply looks like no attempt at all has been made to lip sync what is said with how the speaker’s mouth moves. If you’ve never fully appreciated lip-syncing in games, then Agefield High will show you how jarring it is when things don’t line up.
Unfortunately for Agefield High, it acts like it really wants you to notice these character models, with some truly bizarre cutscenes and camera angles. There is a bemusing frequency to the amount of times a shot of a character lingers longer than necessary where it looks like they are about to say something, only for them to look deadpan to whatever is happening around them.
As Sam, you make friends with Kale and Axel on your first day in a new school. But with only a few months until the end of year, Kale has a plan to finish the year on a high, by essentially ruining it for everyone else, self-brandishing themselves as a ‘Legend’ and heading off to college full of confidence.
But to finish big, you have to start off small. Agefield High does a quite frankly terrible job with its first few missions. Pantie stealing aside, the opening hour will have you cutting the lawn of a neighbour (complete with the worst tank controls ever), tailing the school bully for far too long to steal back a bike, and then stealing back a sex book for your German neighbour. And unfortunately, the missions don’t get any more exciting after that with repetitive missions littered throughout.
Most of them will end in some form of a fight between you and whoever stands in your way. And once again, it feels clunky as hell. And playing this on the Steam Deck, controls are all over the shop. You can lock on to a single target, which is essential, but facing multiple opponents will likely mean you getting rabbit punched over and over again.
When not committing low level thuggery, you will need to attend your lessons. Thanks to an in-game timetable and clock, you will know what lessons you have. It says a lot about the state of the game when one of the best features I noticed was that different lessons were in different classrooms, and you will need to navigate the school to get to them. Colour me shocked when I was expecting the lessons to all be in the same room.
The lessons themselves feel like they have been ripped straight from high school textbooks. On one hand, they’re a good example, but on the other hand, I am playing a videogame. For example, Geography has you naming the country highlighted on a tiny world map and German has you picking the correct translation. Needless to say, my grades in these dropped as low as D and F respectively.
Unfortunately, that may be one of the best features about Agefield High, a game that is made even worse by the number of bugs. NPCs have a tendency to glide across the floor without moving their legs in what you would call a walking motion. The camera has a complete meltdown if you fall off your bike. As an aside to this, I had to try really hard to even do this; cars will drive right into you without any effect, and it was only when I was bodychecked by a lamppost that something even happened. One mission I was also unable to finish after several attempts because at first I thought the button prompt was incorrect, but it turned out that nothing worked in that moment each time.
There is just very little to like about Agefield High. At one point, the smallish open world had its charm as I was cycling around the park with the houses around the edge pointing inwards. I thought that this is a nice quiet town. But even that quickly became tedious when the realisation set in that it is mainly set dressing with absolutely nothing of interest. There are collectibles to find and gather, but this open world is perhaps even more lifeless than the expressionless character faces.
Agefield High: Rock the School is no doubt a bold undertaking, attempting to create a spiritual successor to Bully. But the developers at Refugium Games have clearly bitten off more than they can chew, and it fails at virtually every hurdle. There could be a good game here, the framework is in place, but it needs a serious revamp to get there.
Important Links
Agefield High: Rock the School Revealed In Extended Gameplay Trailer – Skip Class, Start Chaos, Rule The School – https://www.thexboxhub.com/agefield-high-rock-the-school-revealed-in-extended-gameplay-trailer/
Buy from Steam – https://store.steampowered.com/app/3562580/Agefield_High_Rock_the_School/
