Agefield High: Rock the School Jauh Dari Penerus Pengganggu yang Kami Harapkan | Pratinjau IGN

I really wanted to like Agefield High: Rock the School. It wasn’t shy about wearing its Bully influences on its letterman jacket, and Rockstar sure doesn’t seem interested in a sequel. But six missions in, I think I’m ready to drop out of Agefield High. Bathed in hollow early-aughts nostalgia, it feels like the adolescent hallucination of someone who’s never set foot inside of a suburban American high school. Its faux-punk, juvenile tone felt more like a sauceless ChatGPT redux of American Pie-era comedies filtered through a No More Heroes sidequest than a cheeky, Rockstar-style lampooning of Anytown, USA.

I’ve biked from corner to corner of Agefield, delivering food, fighting bullies, maintaining my GPA, and learning to fit in with my fellow rejects. And after dabbling in as much main and side content as possible, I’m struggling to find anything redeemable about this game beyond a gag. The stuff I saw was unpolished, uninspired, and flat. I don’t see the big-picture stuff improving, even if Agefield High’s rougher edges – namely its buggy gameplay and wonky physics – get sanded down before its rapidly approaching August release date.

Groundhog Day

Agefield feels like it’s about to bubble over with appropriate angst. Adults are stuck in dead-end jobs and loveless marriages, teachers don’t know what they’re doing, the elderly are constantly complaining about “kids these days,” and everyone at your school is shaking the bars of their fluorescent-lit enclosure, ready to get on with life. But compared to some of my favorite coming-of-age comedies, it’s all skin-deep. It doesn’t engage with culture, time, or place in a way that measures up to the movies it’s borrowing from. I was two years old in 2002 and even I can tell you this is a hollow knock-off.

I’d feel insane too if I lived in a town the size of four city blocks and heard the same few lines of dialogue everywhere I go. I didn’t keep a strict count, but I think most kinds of NPCs (divided by age and sex) each got about five lines. Some characters like your mom, the school bully, or specific teachers get their own. I swear I’d heard them all within an hour. I think I’ll lose my mind if I hear another “[sound up]” “[sound up],” or “[sound up].”

Are We on SNL?

That should give you a good understanding of the kind of script Refugium Games are working with. Its derivative ideas and un-cartoonish caricatures offer nothing to set this specific shade of grey apart; each cutscene will leave you sighing and rolling your eyes at its parade of cliches. And what is memorable or noteworthy is bad. At the very least, sometimes it’s funny-bad.

This is all made worse by Agefield High’s dogged attempts to undermine each cutscene with uncanny valley characters, whose faces and mouths move and change just enough to be unsettling, but not nearly enough to be taken seriously. Naturally, this is all framed with some of the worst cutscene camera choices I’ve ever seen in a video game. Nearly every cutscene or mission will start with a close-up of a character’s face that lasts seconds longer than it needs to – every time. And every time, they just stand there, staring blankly, often directly into the camera. It’s hilarious, just not for the reasons the writers want.

Nice Bike

I could forgive poor tone or a bad script for some fun gameplay, but Agefield High cast no such lifeline. I spent most of my time with the demo biking around town. Sometimes I was running from a bully or racing against a clock; other times I was meeting up with my friends in the park. You can do tricks on the bike you earn early on in the game, but I was never really encouraged to take advantage of them aside from a few ramps scattered around town. There’s also a skate park close to the center of town, so I have a feeling the final version of Agefield might lean more into that. If there’s anything redeemable in the chunk I played, it’s this.

The cycling isn’t necessarily amazing, but it’s really the only part of the demo that felt right. Crashes even end with that goofy, GTA-like ragdoll, just with wonkier physics. But every once in a while, failing a mission or getting knocked out would respawn the bike in a place that softlocked me from completing the mission. Luckily, Agefield is filthy with bikes you can pick up should your bike spawn in a bad spot.

Solid (Garter) Snake

When you’re not hell on wheels, chances are you’re sneaking around somewhere you shouldn’t be. Most missions ended with some kind of stealth, in fact. This kind of teen comedy almost begs for some stealth-comedy with its panty raids and teachers’ lounge burglary. Unfortunately, these sections aren’t very polished. There’s always an indicator somewhere on-screen telling you when you’re visible, but I swear I’ve been seen while outside of the clearly broadcast vision cones on your HUD, sometimes even through a wall or on another floor. It’s just frustrating how fast-and-loose this stuff felt. Thankfully, these sections are all pretty short, so slipping up – or getting caught by someone with X-Ray Vision – won’t set you back too much.

But sometimes you’ll get caught and need to fight back. This is by far the most egregious part of the gameplay, and also the most frustrating. The fights I played all went the same way: throw punches while locked onto your target, block a few blows, push your enemy to break their guard, kick a few times, and hope that everything connects. While there is a lock-on, there’s no tracking, so each attack is disjointed from every other action, including movement. So you stop moving while punching or pushing. This breaks any momentum or link between attacks you throw out, causing a lot of punches to whiff even though they look like they’d connect. It’s kind of a miracle of physics that the punches are weightless and the movement is heavy.

Study Hall

Your misadventures contend with a rigorous academic schedule that’s lined up with an in-game clock. English, German, Geography, Math, and Music classes all come with a minigame to complete, each ending with a letter grade based on your performance that determines how much of your allowance you actually make. All of them, except for music, are the exact same multiple choice quiz just with German vocab swapped out for identifying countries on a map or filling in missing letters in a word on a spelling quiz. The minigame for music class, which also gets used in one of the last missions of the demo, is a shoddy Guitar Hero-like rhythm game whose inputs don’t hit with any oomph and generally feel offbeat.

You don’t need to attend class, but missing classes will make it harder for you to earn an allowance, thus giving you less money to spend on new clothes, a haircut, or a snack from the hot dog cart. The tutorial even suggested that you might get the attention of the police if you miss enough classes. If you cut class, it’s probably to check out the other side content that’s equally repetitive. I saw two different chore-like missions: a lawnmowing minigame that’s ripped straight from No More Heroes, and a food delivery minigame which is a great way to earn some extra in-game cash. There are also some one-off sidequests that take you to new parts of town, but they follow the same structure as the main stuff.

Grimacing-Face Emoji

Every inch of Agefield feels grey, flavorless, and flat in a way that makes me wonder if AI was used. That’s not an accusation, to be clear, but it’s at the very least an indictment of what’s being presented. There’s no sense of originality or style like in the games and movies it’s so clearly ripping off. It doesn’t help that some characters bear uncomfortably close resemblance to real-life people, like the old man in town named Clint who will look familiar to any fan of Westerns.

A lot of the mechanical wonkiness could potentially be fixed or built upon, but probably not in time for launch, as this game is out next month. I just don’t see its feeble skeleton of Leonardo DiCaprio pointing-level references and unbearably bad writing improving in any meaningful way over the remaining handful of missions. I could see this attaining cult status… but probably more like The Room or Book of Henry than Superbad or Napoleon Dynamite. I have a feeling that fans of the long-sidelined Bully franchise who hoped Agefield High would recapture even a little bit of that classic’s magic will be thoroughly disappointed when Agefield High: Rock The School releases on August 12.

Charlie is a freelance contributor for IGN. You can reach them via Twitter or Instagram at the handle @chas_mke.