Almost twenty years after Rockstar Games last sent anyone to school, someone was finally brave enough to reopen the doors, and it didn't go well.
Agefield High: Rock the School, from a small studio called Refugium Games, is the first genuine attempt to fill the hole left by Bully, the cult-classic 2006 open world title where you play as a kid navigating cliques, classes, and locker-shoving boarding school politics. It was successful and it sold old. There's even demand for it. Unfortunately, fans haven't gotten a sequel for two decades, and we likely never will. Because of this, Agefield High tried to become the answer, and, at least right now, it's looking grim. It has mostly negative reviews on Steam and is sitting at 35% on Metacritic, with the game experiencing constant crashes, stiff uncanny-valley faces, sluggish combat, and an NPC who looks through a handful of lines, forcing you to drop out of the game yourself and never want to touch it again.
Refugium Games also finds itself accused of using artificial intelligence, on a large and careless scale, to make the game. The studio denies it, calling it a handcrafted effort made by a small team of developers for over two and a half a years.
Unfortunately, even if there's no evidence of AI use in the game, it doesn't change the fact that, in the eyes of the internet, it feels generic, cheap, and soulless enough to fall into the "AI slop" category.
To be fair, the game's design isn't necessarily the problem. If anything, they deserve props for the effort. The game crashing and burning after nearly three years in the kitchen is just further proof of how much resources it takes to make a game as good as Bully and why no one has attempted to do it.
Agefield High falling this hard is, by accident, the single best argument for the exact Rockstar decision fans love to complain about, which is its refusal to spread itself across anything but Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption. Take-Two Interactive chief executive Strauss Zelnick has explained more than once why Rockstar will not pump out yearly games or juggle a stable of franchises and a former Rockstar developer has described that same obsessive, one-thing-at-a-time polish as the real reason these worlds feel alive. Agefield High is Exhibit A for what a game could like Bully looks like without whatever Rockstar has.
A living, reactive open world, hundreds of students and teachers with names and routines who actually respond to what you do, is one of the most technically brutal things a game can attempt. Bully pulled it off in 2006 because Rockstar Vancouver had dozens of seasoned developers and a battle-tested RAGE engine under the hood. Every kid at Bullworth had a face, a name, and a schedule because a big, experienced team spent the resources to make it feel alive and like the very same school audiences went to. Refugium built Agefield High with only a fraction of the resources and experience Rockstar had. The ambition was there. They never just had what was necessary to achieve it. The results? They ended up chewing more than they could take on.
You see, the reason nobody has made a proper Bully successor in twenty years is that that even Rockstar, the studio that built the original and even reportedly attempted to make a sequel, decided it just wasn't worth it. When the company with the deepest pockets in the business looks at a school sim and quietly walks away, a tiny studio charging thirty dollars never stood a chance.
Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser has said a sequel kept losing out to bigger priorities, and no game is bigger than Grand Theft Auto VI at the moment. Rockstar's refusal to spread thin is a business call that happens to leave fans looking for an alternative that will most likely never come.
To be clear, none of this makes Agefield High good, and its own developers clearly know where they fell and are falling short, staying up all night pushing patches, copping to first-day nerves, and leaning into a cheeky in-character bit about the paint still being wet on the place.
If you actually want the schoolyard itch scratched, the good news is that the real game is still sitting right there, cheap, on basically every platform you own, aging as gracefully as any Rockstar title can.
