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If you were hoping the American Pie-inspired sandbox game Agefield High: Rock the School would finally provide PS5 with a spiritual successor to Bully, you may want to recalibrate your expectations.
A new IGN preview, which is probably one of the most scathing I’ve ever seen, says the game is “unpolished, uninspired, and flat”. It ultimately doesn’t have any hopes for the title, due out next month on PC, with so little time left until release.
The complaints raised are broad, but include an out-of-touch script, buggy gameplay, and haunting facial animations – as we’ve seen in the title’s various trailers to date.
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The report describes the game as “sauceless”, which is the last thing you want from a title trying to ape the teen comedies of the early 2000s. It also says it doesn’t really capture the era, which is probably the biggest sin here, as it’s trading on nostalgia.
Dev Refugium Games is based in Germany, so I can maybe see how it failed to capture the feel of an American high school. But surely it needed to bring in writers or consultants, as that’s a major selling point of the game.
It’s rare that previews are this negative, because usually writers will account for games being in an unfinished state. But in this case, it seems IGN’s issues are bigger than wonky physics and an inconsistent stealth system.
The PS5 version is at least due out later than on PC, so there’s a possibility some of the game gets cleaned up prior to its console release. But fixing the script is going to be a taller task than buffing out the bugs. Shame.