Agefield High: Rock the School Released—Bully’s Successor is Full of Negative Reviews from Players and Critics

August 12th was a date plenty of Bully fans had been circling on the calendar, as Refugium Games officially released Agefield High: Rock the School, a game in the spirit of the Rockstar Games classic, where you once again play a schoolboy, attend classes, and soak in a genuinely appealing 2000s setting. Unfortunately, neither players nor critics were particularly impressed by the studio's new game, and that's putting it mildly.

The game is now live on all platforms and has picked up its first reviews. It currently sits at 35 on Metacritic, based on 4 critic reviews, with critics describing it as a technical disaster that barely functions properly, plagued by a host of issues. Steam reviews tell a similar story—according to SteamDB, Agefield High: Rock the School sits at nearly 80% negative. Players are pointing to rough character animations and facial expressions, along with serious optimization problems: the game reportedly struggles even on high-end PCs, and its recommended specs list an RTX 3080, 32 GB of RAM, and an AMD Ryzen 5 7600X. Many gamers feel the developers leaned on nostalgia and Bully comparisons to generate hype, and that strategy appears to have backfired. You can check out some Steam reviews below:

DontRunDer:

"It feels like it needs more time in development. The world comes across as robotic, like everyone’s AI pretending to be high schoolers from the 2000s. For the love of god, add some body language to match the speech. It’s not a bad game, but it feels like you just told AI to make a bully-style game with not another teen movie added in. PLEASE FIX"

Teddy:

"I do not recommend to buy the game now. I was hyped for the game since last year but at the time of release it doesn’t play well… It crashes a lot and it contains lag (which i find strange for an 8gb big game). Also, the price in my opinion is way too high for such a game, wouldn’t really pay more than €20, - for it. Hopefully it will be up to standards regarding indie games and will get fixed soon. If I see updates, I might consider buying again to play it."

RealGInstinct:

"Game really needs their animation sorted, really was looking forward to it due to Bully resemblance until the cutscenes (which is kind of main part of such games story and all), animations are close to being non existent gameplay felt like it was made by indie devs yeah no complaints on this but it is missing a lot of features of a completed game. Imo should not have seen the market yet probably rushed at the end just to release it."

Hark_TRITON:

"Game is actually pretty fun, but the performance is absolutely awful. Crashes often and has really bad moments of lagging EVEN on low settings and on a decent PC."

Sillydr4gon:

"I have been looking forward to this game but it crashed about 3 times in my first 30 mins they need to work on that first so not impressed so far but seems to be a game that will be quite fun once they sorted out the problems."

Shortly before launch, Refugium Games had already warned players not to expect a AAA experience or a true Bully sequel, given the small team and limited budget behind the project. Still, this level of backlash likely wasn't part of the plan. The studio clearly has some work ahead fixing the technical issues and bugs before Agefield High: Rock the School can really be judged fairly. As some Steam users have pointed out, though, there's still a decent game buried in there worth exploring.

Agefield High: Rock the School is now available on PC. PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S versions will release later this year.