Back when Rockstar did more than just Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption, they released Bully, which was also known as Canis Canem Edit in some regions of Europe. The game took on the open-world mechanics from the Grand Theft Auto series and provided a good number of activities with a compelling story about a delinquent and his rise to power, including the subsequent takedowns of those who deserved it. It was a well-loved game, and while there were rumors of a sequel over the years, that never came to pass. What makes Agefield High: Rock The School interesting is the fact that no one else has tried to replicate Bully until now, even on a smaller scale. What makes Agefield High: Rock the School disappointing is how badly it fumbles the assignment.

You play the role of Sam, a high school senior who moved to the small town of Agefield a few months before graduation due to his parents' divorce. On his first day, he meets up with Kale and Axel, two boys who plan on being remembered as legends upon graduation. To do that, Kale has a plan to take down the head jock Seth and make it to prom, where they'll be the headline act.

At the outset, the game warns you that it is aiming for humor similar to raunchy teen movies from the late '90s/early 2000s, like American Pie or Eurotrip. That is all well and good for those who grew up in that era of film, but the game doesn't do a good job of being funny. You get a few references to American Pie in things like street names and even one of the achievements. There's a banana gag you'll find early on in the game, and the school guard's obsession with making sure that students don't get pregnant is ridiculous enough to be funny. Most of the jokes do poorly because of repetition or delivery or the fact that the same joke has been repeated in other media without any real changes. Humor is always subjective, but something is wrong when it fails to elicit laughs from someone who lived through and enjoyed that era of comedy.

Additionally, the story is not that great. It's fine that a bunch of nobodies want to be remembered in high school. However, the notion that a parent would move her family to another town a few months before graduation is completely unbelievable unless there were a dire reason for it, and there isn't one. Kale's plans are also dumb, since they're something no teen would be doing, and there are also other situations that seem implausible for a small town. None of the characters are likable, and it gets worse when you saddle them with a script that doesn't make them sound like normal teenagers. It's not that the teens are more worldly than expected, but they're saying things no one would normally say, even if they got the slang right.

From a gameplay perspective, Agefield High mimics the general structure of Bully but to a smaller degree. Weekends are generally free, but weekdays have you following a schedule where you're expected to attend class, but nothing is stopping you from ditching them. Your classes include some typical subjects like English and Math, with Music making an appearance as well. It's odd to see Geography when that's more of an elementary or middle school class. Seeing German is plausible but still feels out of place, considering how few schools at the time offered it as an optional foreign language. The end of the school day means having free rein in the world without any cops trying to bust you for truancy, but the game enforces a mandatory sleep time of 3am. If you're not in bed by 3am, you'll sleep on the spot you're standing, which is hilarious to see. Throughout that time, you'll pay attention to the time to determine which activities you can participate in. That time also governs when you can actually tackle the main missions that advance the story.

To put things bluntly, Agefield High is an absolute mess in every way. This starts with the cut scenes, which are awful. Aside from the graphics, which we'll get to later, the pacing is the big culprit. Just about every one of the cut scenes lingers on for far too long, and there's loads of dead space before every camera cut. This creates awkwardness, as conversations fail to flow normally, and you have moments where it seems like characters are gazing at one another longingly, waiting for someone to make the first move. It can be unintentionally funny to see the first few times.

If you choose to attend class, you'll be subjected to lengthy bouts of questions in a multiple-choice format. The difficulty of each quiz is completely dependent on the class subject. English is about filling in the letter combinations to correctly spell a word, and even though Math does the four primary functions of addition, division, subtraction, and multiplication, the numbers are large enough that some thought is needed. Geography is terrible because you can't zoom in on the map, and the game asks for countries that are the size of a dust speck on the given map's scale. German is a pure guessing game if you've never seen the language before. The game gives you cash for your performance, and while you don't need to get 100% on each quiz, the teacher always laments that you aren't good enough, even if you only got one question wrong. It works fine, but it is also boring, just like school.

The biggest offender is Music. You're presented with a guitar and a three-lane highway. The path has notes coming down, but the fret line is in the middle of the screen. The game seems to assume that you're an expert with rhythm games, as each song presents you with a plethora of notes almost all at once. If you're using a controller, all of the notes are hit with different d-pad directions, which is very unintuitive. However, the notes all come down at a glacial speed, and none of them line up with the beats of the song playing in the background. Even when compared to some of the really bad rhythm games of yesteryear such as Power Gig: Rise of the Six String, the rhythm section in Agefield High is absolutely horrendous.

You will be asked to fight a good amount of the time, but everything related to combat is awkward. This starts with the controls. If you're using a gamepad, your punch is on a trigger, but every other move is on a face button, which feels unintuitive compared to other rhythm games. Landing your blows is difficult because each action is delivered slowly. No one is expecting Sam to be a martial arts expert, but only being able to throw one punch or kick with no combos is weak. None of your moves feel like they make an impact, but what's worse is that your enemies can practically stun-lock you to death. This can happen as early as the tutorial fight and reinforces that the fighting just isn't fun.

One would think that skipping classes would lead to some funny open-world scenarios, but that's far from the case. The side activities are all boring or broken in some way. Mowing a lawn, for example, has you wrestling with the controls, which are so sensitive and awkward that you'll never be able to mow in a straight line. You'll just go around in wide arcs until you somehow get the job done, all while taking more time than expected. You'll run into pedestrians, but they often ignore you beyond cursing you out for bumping into them. Picking a fight with them is also a fool's errand, as you get nothing from winning and a loss of progress for losing.

This is an uneventful open world to explore that's made more mind-numbing due to your traversal speed. Your running is pitifully slow, but at least it takes a long time before you finally burn up all your stamina, at which point you're forced to walk. If you can find a bike, even jumping on a bike is a chore because the button for mounting and dismounting is sometimes unresponsive, and you end up taking your sweet time jumping on when the button does work. Riding the bike is like driving a car, but any bump sends you flying off and landing awkwardly. Meanwhile, your bike floats down and sometimes that happens at weird angles. Mounting it becomes impossible, and it's just faster to abandon it in favor of spawning in a new bike. Even if you can overcome all of that, the world is devoid of things to explore, as you may find crates to kick but their paltry cash rewards make the act feel like a waste of time.

You'll have to get used to this mundane world, as your main story quests will have you traveling often from one point to another, and there's no means of fast travel available. Some of the quests have you fighting, which feels like a crapshoot in terms of whether you're actually winning in the skirmish. Most of the quests are stealth-based missions, which feel both broken and inconsistent. You'll get a taste of this when trying to retrieve a girl's panties from her house. You need to avoid her mother, who only notices you if you stand up, leading her to call for security in a modest-looking house. Other stealth missions will have the mission end immediately if the major antagonist sees you, giving you a long menacing glare as the failure screen appears. If other antagonists see you, they chase you and barely touch you, as you're forced to button-mash to push them. Sometimes the mission has the main antagonist immediately end your mission but then lets them behave like a regular person you can escape from after a short cut scene. Sometimes no one will give chase until you're deep within their cone of sight. At other moments, the mission ends when someone sees you from very far away and even through walls. These story quests are made even worse by the fact that hitting anyone else during your mission results in a game over, so the promise of "complete freedom" over your actions is a lie.

On top of these aforementioned issues, there's the lack of stability in Agefield High. Systems with lower specs have crashed often, but you'll still experience crashing with systems of the high-middle and high range, even after applying the first few patches. The lawn mowing sequence had a black screen upon starting the activity and a full freeze in the middle of the event that required a force quit on the game. Several of these crash types happen throughout the game's 10-hour runtime, so even if the previously mentioned issues don't stop you from trying to finish the game, the general instability might do that if you aren't diligent about manually saving.

Graphically, Agefield High looks unintentionally below average in still shots. The environments are fine, but the colors feel muted during the daytime, and nighttime doesn't fare any better. The interiors of houses feature lots of pictures and posters that repeat, and family photos indicate that everyone only has one outfit at all times. Some of the architectural choices are also strange, such as having a wall with a door only extending halfway across a room, thereby making its presence unnecessary. The characters look decent, but the faces look like they don't sport much detail. Their clothing shows off generic phrases instead of fake logos that would've at least given the fashion some personality.

Then you have everything moving, and things really fall apart. Get into a cut scene, and you'll see that the mouths and eyes barely move on any of these characters. No one will look at each other when speaking, and the range of emotions is so small that everyone looks like they're bored. Animation in general doesn't go smoothly, so can even see where your run animation stutters when everything else runs fine, while cars pivot on a turn also in a stuttering motion. Fighting incurs a screen shake with every move you perform, and there's no option to turn that off, and nothing moves naturally.

Compared to the graphics, the sound fares even worse. The effects are weak, especially the fighting since each move you perform comes with no impact. The music is generic but repetitive, and despite what the fast credits would tell you, there doesn't seem to be too many songs. The vocal performances range from poor to halfway decent, but you can definitely tell that the cast doesn't have English as their native language. Everything has a low volume overall, even if you boost all of your audio options.

Linux PCs will run this game without any issues. Steam Deck users will find that the game is quite heavy for the portable system. By default, the game tries to run with Balanced upscaling and a High preset, but that seems foolhardy since the game only peaks at 19fps with very long load times to the point where you'd think that the game has crashed. The best way to make the game playable is to get the game to the lowest graphical preset with upscaling set to Ultra Performance. This gets the game to hover between 30-40fps, so it plays well enough. The problem is that the game looks terrible this way. The lighting completely destroys the hair on every character, making everyone look like they have bad hair plugs. The low resolution resulted in extreme fizzling on everything, making trees look messy and signs unreadable. This is one of those cases where you have to not care about a game's graphics if you want to play this on the Deck. For battery life, you're looking at 90 minutes on average on a full charge, but at least you won't hear the fan whirling away at top speed when playing.

The only good thing about Agefield High: Rock The School is that the developers have been working on patches for the game. There is a slim chance that a constant flow of patches can turn around this game's fortunes and give it a comeback story similar to what happened with Crime Boss: Rockay City. However, that is a big mountain to climb. With a weak story, terrible characters, poor gameplay mechanics, an awful presentation, and a heap of technical issues, there is currently no reason to give Agefield High a look, even if you've been aching for something similar to Bully.

Score: 2.0/10