Agefield High: Rock the School review for PC

I’ll be blunt: there’s literally nothing remotely good or redeeming about Agefield High. While it’s not quite the worst game I’ve ever played (that will almost certainly always go to the incomprehensible pile of AI slop known as GUG), it’s not far off from that dubious honour, either.

Part of the reason why Agefield High is so bad is that the template for what the game was trying to do is right there: it’s a clone of Bully that proudly claims to be an homage to the teen movies of the late ‘90s/early ‘00s. Even if the game doesn’t have Rockstar’s expertise and budget behind it, you’d think its developers could at least try to copy the obvious blueprint and not get too much in the way.

But the result is less American Pie or Can’t Hardly Wait, and more Not Another Teen Movie. But even that is giving Agefield High too much credit, because it doesn’t even attain that level of competency. Maybe a direct-to-DVD movie (or, I guess, direct-to-streaming on the worst streaming service imaginable)? Or, maybe even more accurately, the video game equivalent of a porn parody, without the sex and nudity?

That last example certainly covers the voice acting, at least. Imagine a movie where it sounded like the actors had never before encountered human speech, and you have a good idea of what you’re in for here. This may be where the teen movie influence comes in – it’s entirely possible that Agefield High’s developers fed the scripts of those movies into AI, and had it churn out gems like, “Have you heard of that concert?” and “I’m a good-looking girl!”, and those lines in turn are spoken with only slightly more humanity than a computer from twenty years ago trying to do text-to-speech.

For some unfathomable reason, the game thinks so highly of its dialogue that it features lots of zoomed-in shots of the characters’ faces. This, unsurprisingly, highlights another of Agefield High’s issues, which is that the characters all look like nightmare fuel. You know how a big problem with a lot of modern games is the uncanny valley, where they look almost human but not quite? This is about as far from that as you can get, and the characters all look like basic assets that the developers got dirt cheap, with dead eyes to ensure no one could ever mistake them for real people.

On top of that, it’s clear that the developers didn’t want to go to the trouble of figuring out how to properly animate the mouths, so you have close-ups of faces as each character speaks…except the bits of animation that they threw in don’t really match up at all.

Needless to say, Agefield High doesn’t work all that well when you play it, either. There are a lot of fetch quests, and even though they sound like they could give the game a personality – albeit a personality lifted straight from those teen movies of a few decades ago, since we’re talking about a game where the missions are “go on a panty raid to steal a popular girl’s underwear” and “steal back the sex book of a random German townsperson from a group of unruly teens” – they absolutely do not, manage to combine feeling kind of pervy with being dull and repetitive.

Agefield High also fails miserably when it comes to combat – which is another problem, since a large number of those quests involve tracking down other students and getting into fights. You’re supposed to win the fights to become one of the most popular kids in school, except your offense consists of weak punches, shoves and kicks, none of which do much. You’re also regularly expected to use these weak moves to take on groups of other students, at which point you’ll find yourself woefully outmatched because you can only focus on one enemy at a time, leaving the others to circle around behind you and beat you senseless.

The game even fails at being a school simulator. It gives you a class schedule that you’re expected to adhere to, and when you go to class you get pop quizzes that it feels like no one ever double-checked for accuracy – whether it’s a geography class with a map that has tiny countries and no way to zoom in when you need to identify a country, or a spelling test that gives you multiple correct answers and you need to guess which one the game wants (as in, it gives you “CU_” and the options for the final letters are S, D, and T, two of which are acceptable words).

It should come as no surprise, of course, that the game’s performance is awful and the game is completely unoptimized. When it works, it struggles to render the world around you, with shadows and buildings and everything else popping into and out of existence. And when it doesn’t work – which is quite often – it crashes, giving you the pleasure of having to go back and play even more of it.

Or, obviously, you could just not play Agefield High, and not subject yourself to any of it. I understand that a game being this bad and broken may be alluring to some people, but I can guarantee you it’s not worth it – not at the surprisingly high price the game is being sold at now, and not even if the game were being sold at a deep discount. There’s not a single point to be made in the game’s favour, and if it were to be nuked from space and erased from existence the world would be a slightly better place.

Refugium Games provided us with an Agefield High: Rock the School PC code for review purposes.