Agefield High: Rock the School! Is an action-adventure coming-of-age game set in the titular town of Agefield. Read our review to see what it did well, what it didn’t, and whether it’s worth trying.
Overview
What is Agefield High: Rock the School!?
Agefield High: Rock the School! is an action-adventure game by Refugium Games that features a coming-of-age story set in the titular town of Agefield. Featuring raunchy, early 2000s humor and aesthetics, Agefield High takes players on the journey of a lifetime, or at least the start of one, as they try to survive high school in a new town where nobody knows their name.
Agefield High: Rock the School! features:
⚫︎ Raunchy, early 2000’s humor
⚫︎ Simplified, old-school console gameplay
⚫︎ Smaller open-world with hours of activities to explore and discover
⚫︎ 10-hours of story missions and main campaign content
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| $29.99 |
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Agefield High: Rock the School! Review: A Dropout Title Unworthy of Nostalgia
In Memory of a Certain Delinquent
Nostalgia is a powerful thing that keeps one's fondest memories in the softest alcoves of one’s heart. It is a force of emotion that keeps innocence and harbors joy for those who experience it, but is also a force that corrupts and misremembers.
I bring this up because Agefield High: Rock the School! had me nostalgic and reminiscent of certain times as I played it. This game was very clearly inspired by the adventures of a certain delinquent named Jimmy Hopkins of Rockstar fame, but Agefield didn’t have me thinking fondly of Bully or the early 2000s. No, the only thing Agefield had me remembering wistfully was my life before I had to play it.
Confusing, aimless, and offensive to the eyes, the only reason I had to go down memory lane with it is so I can properly express how incompatible each of its constituent pieces are with each other. Like a creation fighting its own existence, it revolted at the concept of being enjoyable and raged at the player with difficulty spikes for no other reason than apparent spite.
Whether this was on purpose to evoke a certain aesthetic or idea is arguable—and argue it, I shall—but one thing is true regardless: this is not a game worthy of the nostalgia it's trying to evoke.
Welcome to Agefield, Where Exposition Flows Like Water
Let’s begin this trainwreck with the game’s story. Agefield High: Rock the School! is set in Agefield, a small, fictional early 2000s town that protagonist Sam Tatum moved into within the last three months of school. Moved away from his friends and forced to re-learn his place in a whole new town, Sam is ill-equipped to face the hardest challenge of his life yet: high school.
Now, if that seems like a clumsy introduction, then it’ll be right at home with Agefield’s dialogue and writing, because I bear no hyperbolic intention in saying that it is the most atrocious, exposition-heavy, fat-fingered attempt at a coming-of-age story I’ve ever had the displeasure of experiencing.
The game’s overall story is neither anything to write home about, nor is it consequential to any measurable degree. Even as a slice-of-life, coming-of-age attempt, where stakes are almost always limited to shallow personal ideals, much of the game’s happenings can be relegated to half-remembered memories of vague goals.
Mowing grass, biking to school, part-time jobs, and failed tests are all memories that most people can definitely relate to, so the issue isn’t that the game covers alienating topics. No, the issue is that, together, these story beats, missions, characters, dialogues, settings, and plot points all coalesce into a heaping pile of mundanity.
The only reason it’s even worth remembering is because of the dialogue, which somehow toes the line between "trying too hard" and "not trying at all". For example, let’s take the main character’s first class introduction? Most writers would avoid making direct introductions and plain declarations of intent because…well…who talks like that? For Agefield, that’s exactly what you get.
After a brief set of formalities, you’re clumsily given every major character’s portfolio by the nearest NPC, before promptly getting the most awkward teacher introduction I’ve seen since Kung Fu Panda.
Later, in the park, after the player is forced through a grueling combat tutorial while standing up to a bully, the game’s supporting cast and their goals are introduced with all the subtlety of a wrecking ball. A hop, skip, and a jump later, you’re stealing a lady’s underwear right out of her room, stealing bikes, and getting beat up by the cast of Riverdale.
And that’s another thing: all this odd dialogue and clumsy exposition is framed in early 2000s slang and raunchy humor. Neither of those are bad by themselves, but there is such a thing as a poor execution of an otherwise acceptable and chronologically accurate manner of speaking. That is to say, the raunch is fine; it’s all just unfunny and unoriginal to the point of transcending eye-rolls.
That’s Agefield’s story in a nutshell: aimless, raunchy just for the sake of it, and completely mundane. There’s no excitement—heck, it barely gets me nostalgic—so it’s hard to push through to the next chapter. Unfortunately, that’s not the only thing standing in the player’s path to enjoyment.
So Little to Do, So Little to See
Agefield is a whole town, and once the player is past the game’s first day, which serves as a tutorial, the rest of town opens up for exploration. I write this under no uncertain terms, but this game has so much space, with so little to do within said space. Massive swathes of open green fields and empty hallways just for players to run through without as much as a point of interest to keep them engaged.
There are mission areas across the entire map, separated by entire neighborhoods that take minutes to get to, even by bike. These missions then take you to far-flung mission areas, one after the other, to do some sneaking or running away. Then rinse, repeat.
If you’re not doing that, you’re off doing some teenage shenanigans like playing off-brand Guitar Hero, running food deliveries, or just being dumb in some random alleyway. None of this is offensive, and the fact that it’s so diverse should mean there’s much to do and enjoy, right? Wrong, because all of these, like the story, equate to nothing of value.
Most activities just give you money, which you can use to buy bikes and cosmetics. Others move the uninteresting story forward some before being halted by some shenanigans again. Others, still, don’t accomplish anything at all and are just sort of there. It sounds like GTA San Andreas, but at least that game made the lawlessness of your acts part of the fun. Here, a toe out of line gets you in trouble, and there’s honestly little a kid can do about it.
Regardless, it all just seems aimless, because it is. There’s the pretense that the story is what holds all of these together, but that’s a loose suggestion at best, and the freedom to explore does not pay off enough to make up for the difference. Random missions and minor activities don’t make an open-world worthwhile, even if it is a rather small one.
But surely it’s not all aimless, random teenage tasks you can get up to, right? What about school? Well, right you are. When the game isn’t spinning its wheels and getting you nowhere, it’s smacking you over the head with a random difficulty spike.
Randomly Difficult to the Point of Being Unfun
Some days, you’re sneaking by the least attentive bully ever to find out where they put the bike they stole. Other days, you’re stuck in the same Guitar Hero sequence because you missed a single note, and must endure the same 3-minute gameplay block just to progress. Other days still, you forget where Portugal is and get labeled an idiot.
Yeah, Agefield, for some reason, saw it fit to gate progression with random cutscenes and story sequences that utilize clumsy mechanics and have razor-thin tolerance for errors. The Guitar Hero sequences are among the most egregious, requiring you to get all notes perfectly. One wrong press, one errant twitch, and boom: you’re restarting the whole thing.
What about a crank call that features a Mass Effect-style dialogue choice section, of which there’s one correct choice between three per question, and five questions total? Get one wrong, and you’re hearing all that janky dialogue again with no way to skip.
Perhaps a spelling test for your English class will get your gears turning? Sure, easy enough. Don’t miss a single one, though, else you’ll be considered stupid and get less money, with no means to try again unless you restart. Same goes for the Geography test, and every test you get for your different classes. Perfection or nothing is the name of the game.
Why? Why is this game this way? Why must the player choose between inconsequential, pointless tasks or impassable skill checks? Why can’t an activity just be engaging and/or somewhat challenging? These are the questions I found myself asking as my eyes glazed over from boredom after my third retry of the Guitar Hero sequence.
These can be balanced with simple patches, so I question why nobody ever thought about balancing them BEFORE the game’s release. The devs could’ve at least added a means to make the game's QoL slightly more bearable and make the sequences skippable between player inputs. But no, one must suffer through it the same way, time after mind-shredding time.
Taxing System Requirements for Apparently No Visual Reason
Moving on to the game’s presentation now, and we’re treated to some good things, finally. Credit where it’s due, the game is massive, and the construction of the town is impressive, if a bit empty. I dove into the BTS of this game’s map creation, and a lot of elbow grease really went into its planning, layout, and proximity. I’d say it was all to good effect (poor mission placement and general aimlessness notwithstanding), but even that cannot justify the game’s system requirements.
For a game that looks like it's trying to be an old-school rollick through the nonsense of the 2000s, Agefield High requires some comparable beef in your system to run it. One would think it’s for the game’s visuals and the fidelity of everything in town, and one would be right, though you’d rather wish you were wrong.
See, even if you do manage the game’s surprisingly high requirements, you’re not in for a visual treat, not from the game’s characters at least. Because even if the grass is visible down to the blade, and the trees actually manage to sway between the godrays, the game’s visual identity is butchered by its chopped character models.
It’s hard to put it delicately, but I will try my best. 3D modelling isn’t easy by any measure, so whoever made these characters look the way they do gets some leeway. "Some" being the keyword, because it’s hard to completely forgive the dead eyes, tree-like hair, desynced mouth movements, and stone-faced reactions every single character in this game gives me whenever I have to hazard a look.
Purpose-built ugliness is excusable–helpful, even—when used in the right context, but this doesn’t completely come off as something done on purpose (more on that later). Every new character is a new uncanny horror to look at, and that’s only if you do manage to run this game without issues.
Sounds as Awful as It Looks
The sound department’s not off the hook, which is hard to believe considering these are usually the guys that make even the most cursed-looking games bearable (Plok and Buck Bumble come to mind). Unfortunately, it’s true; this game sounds as awful as it looks, and I don’t just mean the cheesiness of its skate rock soundtrack.
The voice acting isn’t great; in fact, it’s barely passable. The deliveries are as flaccid as the character models, and the emotion just isn’t there. It’s not even so bad to be memorable; it kinda is just there and slightly awful. The game definitely could benefit from some reshoots, maybe some recasts if the devs can afford it, because as it is, there's no reason to play this game unmuted.
Jury’s Still Out Whether This Was Bad on Purpose
So…yeah…Agefield High: Rock the School isn’t good. It’s actually so bad that I’m inclined to think that it’s on purpose. See, it’s very hard for every aspect of a game to go so poorly. Bad quality is usually a matter of allocating too much effort into one aspect of development over another, and rarely is it the case that everything just ends up subpar.
I think this game’s poor quality, or at least some of it, was a deliberate attempt to emulate the limitations of games from the early 2000s. Bully is the most direct comparison, but technically any action-adventure game will fit the bill, and if that is the case, this recontextualizes everything about Agefield High.
Not enough for it to be a good product, mind you—this game has enough problems without its dated-but-systemically-taxing visuals and equally dated music—but it does give its indie team a bit of a pass. Instead of inexperience being the probable cause for this game’s misbegotten creation, it becomes ill-guided nostalgia.
This is why I brought it up as a force that corrupts and misremembers at the start: Agefield is a warped memory of those early 2000s games given modern form. Maybe the characters look like that because that’s how chopped early character models were. Maybe missions are unoptimized and unbalanced because that’s just how it was back then.
It could all very well be an awful time delivered with a wink; I’d still think it’s not worth anyone’s time. Even if you were a fan of Bully, or any game of this kind, this emulation isn’t comparable to the actual thing (which is likely still available for purchase, by the way). You’re better off literally just playing those, because then at least the memory would be real.
Regardless, whether it was on purpose or not, Agefield High’s problems make it a bad product. A game must be fun at some point, and should have a goal above "making it feel like a certain time". Agefield arguably succeeds in making it feel like it’s the early 2000s again, sure, but if this is what all the rage was at the time, I think I’d rather forget both.
Is Agefield High: Rock the School! Worth It?
Not Worth Your Lunch Money
This game is not worth your lunch money unless you get like ten bucks or less to work with per school day. Coming in at an unreasonable $29.99, this game will give you buyer’s remorse before you even play it. It’ll take a clearance sale for this to be worth its price, unless some major balancing and optimizations take place. Otherwise, you’re literally better off just buying the older games this one emulates.
FAQ
Does Agefield High: Rock the School! Have Additional Language Localizations?
Agefield High: Rock the School! has no additional audio localizations and only has its voiceovers available in English. It does have translated subtitles for English, French, Italian, German, Spanish (Spain), Brazilian Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Russian, and Turkish.
Does Agefield High: Rock the School! Have Console Controls?
Yes. According to the game’s developer in an official Steam Community forum post, Agefield High: Rock the School! fully supports Xbox controller inputs.
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