Agefield High: Rock the School Review

You play as Sam, a fresh arrival to the sleepy small town of Agefield where there are a few months left to go in his senior year. He quickly falls in with a crew of characters, including one named Kale for some reason. The grand plot revolves around a “Rock the School” master plan to stick it to the man, take down the jocks, and leave a legacy before graduation. That’s a lot of pressure for a teenager, and Sam instantly gets made fun of for being an outsider, picks a fight with a jock, and makes friends with people who don’t seem like they’re ready to graduate if their maturity is anything to go by. You get to style Sam not to your liking, but to your level of tolerance. The default model is dorky, and you can certainly make him look dorkier. The developers try to frame this like a coming of age story you’d see in movies and television shows of the time, but it’s more like a succumbing to rage story as every cutscene and interaction is unbelievably grating.

There are 30 missions, ranging from main to side activities, running you all-in-all around 20 hours to complete everything. There’s also six types of collectibles that I was absolutely not interested in grabbing, only ever accidentally. When not in a mission, you’re free to roam as you please. Early on the game shows that you don’t have to be on-foot, you can use a bicycle to get around, which looks like a promotional bike for McDonald’s. Besides that, these are high school seniors, why aren’t they driving cars? Anyway, riding the bike and bunny-hopping over things is technically functional, though you’ll quickly learn that bikes crawl the second they touch grass. Still, bunny-hopping into bewildered pedestrians and cops who respond with nothing more than a generic “damn kids these days” grumble is momentarily amusing.

The Steam description for Agefield High: Rock the School boasts a “Complex Time and School System” where you’re supposedly tethered to a schedule you have to follow. The reward for attending your classes? Being quizzed on a foreign language, playing a poor Guitar Hero knockoff, and taking spelling tests for some reason. You do get paid for attending, which is an odd concept all by itself. In actuality, attending class is entirely pointless as you skip classes with zero repercussions. So you’re probably going to spend a lot of time in free-roam, and the town can sometimes feel convincing, but is most times barren and dull.

Every mission is like a fever dream. One mission has you sneaking into a girl’s house to steal her underwear, but the house is so empty and bathed in yellow wallpaper that it looks like something out of The Backrooms. During this ‘stealth’ mission, doors automatically opened by themselves, scaring the shit out of me because I thought I was about to fail. Other missions will have you following a person to see what they’re up to, complete with the meter of detection ensuring you don’t get too close. Lastly, there’s missions where you just have to fight. That’s the entire game’s mission variety, or lack thereof.

When, not if you get into an altercation, you’ll have to engage with the boring and dreadful “combat”. The fight system absolutely sucks: there’s no lock-on mechanic because why would there be, and there’s no way to judge how much health you or your opponent have. So it just becomes a game of throwing the first successful punch and keeping that flurry of punches and kicks going until they’re knocked out. In later sections, you’ll actually have a tire iron and essentially commit assault with a deadly weapon.

There was an early cutscene where two girls were arguing, and I couldn’t tell which of them was talking because of the scene direction and awful facial animations. Conversations are agonizingly paced, punctuated by long, vacant stares and stiff, twitchy head movements that don’t even approximate human emotion. It completely shatters any semblance of immersion, replacing dramatic timing with accidental comedy of the most depressing variety. Everything is written mean, in the spirit of the era, but it’s just cringe-inducing.

I set all the game’s settings to the maximum, and there were times in indoor sections I’d get over 100fps, but traversing the outside tanked me down to 60fps. This is not a pretty game, nor is it an optimized one. Truthfully, Agefield High: Rock the School has way more issues than just its visuals and framerates.

With the PlayStation 5 release of Agefield High: Rock the School this week, and other consoles later this year, you have been warned. I played this game at release, and revisited it after three updates, and there appears to be no real improvements that help it. It’s a fundamentally flawed and broken game, and these updates are not correcting that. There’s not a memorable mission, character, or moment – it’s creatively bankrupt, and aggressively unfun. It’s one of the worst games I’ve ever played – it’s not Bully, it’s just bullshit.