New Open World PS5 Game Is Basically Bully 2 — But Should You Buy It?

Key Takeaways:

• Agefield High: Rock the School launches on PS5 on September 25, 2026, and Xbox Series on October 2, 2026.
• The game is developed by Refugium Games and published by Perp Games — an indie studio previously known for Greyhill Incident.
• Players control new student Sam navigating his senior year at Agefield High in an early 2000s open-world setting.
• The game features a time and school attendance system, open-world exploration, 32 main missions, and roughly 8–10 hours of story content.
• It offers two types of currency — money earned from attending classes and money earned from side jobs.
• The PC version launched on August 12, 2026 to Mostly Negative Steam reviews and a 35 Metacritic score, with broken missions and crashes reported at launch.
• More recent Steam reviews have shifted to Mixed, suggesting post-launch patches have improved things somewhat.
• Bully 2 from Rockstar has never been officially announced, with co-founder Dan Houser citing bandwidth issues as the reason a sequel never happened.

The Bully Sequel Rockstar Never Made — Someone Else Tried to Build It

If you’ve been waiting for a Bully sequel for the last 20 years, you already know the drill. Every couple of years a leak surfaces, hope sparks briefly, and then Rockstar says nothing and goes back to printing money with GTA Online. Dan Houser, Rockstar’s co-founder, finally addressed it directly at LA Comic Con in 2025, explaining that Bully 2 never happened because of “bandwidth issues” — the studio simply couldn’t maintain a small lead creative team across multiple major projects at once. With GTA 6 consuming everything for the better part of a decade, Bully got left on the shelf indefinitely.

That’s a long time to leave a fanbase waiting, and into that vacuum steps Agefield High: Rock the School — an open-world high school game developed by indie studio Refugium Games that is, without any question, positioning itself as the Bully spiritual successor nobody at Rockstar was going to build. It hits PS5 on September 25, 2026, priced at $27.49. The question isn’t really whether it’s inspired by Bully — it absolutely is. The question is whether it’s actually worth your money, especially after what happened on PC at launch.

Agefield High Rock the School

What Is Agefield High: Rock the School?

Agefield High is set in the early 2000s and follows Sam, a new transfer student who just moved to the town of Agefield right before his final year of high school. He quickly falls in with two friends named Kale and Axel who are dead set on making their last year of school legendary. Together, the three of them set their “Rock the School” plan in motion — which, as you’d expect, involves a lot of missions, rebellion, and generally causing chaos in and around Agefield.

The structure should feel immediately familiar to anyone who played Bully. You’ve got a small open world covering the school campus, town center, neighborhoods, and countryside. There are 32 main missions spread across 8–10 hours of story content, a time-based school attendance system, side activities, and the freedom to just roam and mess around. Classes can be attended or skipped — though there are consequences for cutting class, including teachers and local police keeping tabs on you. Attending and doing well in class earns you money, with an A grade paying out $20 and each lower grade reducing that by $5. It’s a simple system, but it’s clearly trying to capture the way Bully used mini-game classes to break up the open-world flow.

The game is rated Mature 17+ for Sexual Themes and Strong Language, and leans hard into raunchy early 2000s teen comedy energy — think American Pie rather than anything with actual depth. The developers at Refugium Games have been upfront about this. They’ve described the humor as edgy and “a bit offensive,” noting that the guidance counselor Ms. Wallace would just call it Tuesday. If that kind of humor isn’t your thing, the game isn’t trying to hide what it is. The same goes for production scale — this is an indie game with a handcrafted small town, not a massive sandbox competing with AAA open worlds.

How Close Is It Really to Bully?

Pretty close in concept, much less close in execution. The DNA is clear: new student arrives at a school, navigates social dynamics through GTA-style missions, manages time around a class schedule, and explores an open world with both structured objectives and freeform activities. That is exactly the Bully template, and Agefield High doesn’t try to hide its inspiration. IGN described it as wearing “its Bully inspirations very clearly on its letterman jacket,” which is about as apt a summary as you’ll find.

Where Bully distinguished itself was in the quality of its mission design, its characterization, and how well all the systems fit together. Jimmy Hopkins had personality. Bullworth Academy felt alive. The class mini-games were clever diversions that fed into the larger game loop in a meaningful way. Agefield High is working with a fraction of Rockstar’s resources and experience, and that gap shows in the final product — at least in the PC version that launched in August.

The game features customization options including clothes, bikes, and hairstyles — another Bully callback — and the open world does give you the freedom to explore and get into trouble outside of the main story. Side hustles exist alongside the main missions, and there are two different endings depending on how you play through the story. But by most critical accounts, the moment-to-moment feel of being in Agefield just doesn’t match what made Bullworth Academy memorable. It’s structurally Bully without the soul that made Bully special.

The PC Launch Was a Disaster — But It’s Getting Better

There’s no way to write about Agefield High honestly without addressing what happened when it launched on Steam on August 12, 2026. It was bad. Every critic review published on launch day was negative, sitting at or below a 30 on Metacritic. The overall Metacritic score landed at 35 from four critic reviews. The Steam user rating came in at Mostly Negative, with only 36% of reviews being positive across nearly 950 reviews. Two reviewers couldn’t even finish the game because crashes wiped their save data.

The criticisms were consistent and severe. Missions broke frequently. The school attendance mechanic — the game’s signature feature — reportedly had no actual consequences working correctly at launch. Combat was described as laggy and unresponsive. Character animations produced an uncanny valley effect that multiple reviewers singled out. One Steam reviewer noted that the game’s time system bugged out and stayed on Tuesday for two in-game days. A review on Metacritic described it as having broken missions, broken mechanics, and busted graphics, calling it one of the worst technical performances they’d ever seen. WayTooManyGames concluded that the whole thing felt structurally like it belonged in 2006 — and was somehow still worse than games from that era in several ways.

The good news — and there genuinely is some — is that Refugium Games has been pushing updates since launch. More recent Steam reviews have shifted the game’s rating to Mixed, which represents a real improvement from where it started. Whether that’s enough to make the PS5 version worth buying at launch, or whether console players will benefit from those patches being baked in from day one, is the real question heading into September 25.

What the PS5 Version Needs to Deliver

Console players are in an interesting position with Agefield High. The PC version served as a live stress test that exposed the game’s worst problems, and in theory the PS5 release arrives with those patches already applied. Perp Games, the publisher handling the console SKUs, is presumably not going to push the same broken build that killed the Steam reception. That’s the optimistic read. The pessimistic read is that a game with foundational design issues — mission structure that doesn’t feel cohesive, combat that critics found simplistic and unengaging, a world that feels too empty for the ambition it’s reaching for — can’t be fixed by patches alone.

What PS5 players need from the console version is stability first, but also some actual improvements to the mission pacing and the feel of the world. The DualSense vibration support is confirmed, which could help the combat feel more physical than it apparently does on mouse and keyboard. A locked 60 frames per second would go a long way given that the PC version struggled with performance. And frankly, if the school attendance system actually works as designed — with real consequences for skipping, real rewards for attending, and properly timed mission unlocks — that alone would put the game in a meaningfully better place than where it started on PC.

Why There’s Still a Reason to Root for Agefield High

Here’s the thing though — as rough as the launch was, there’s something worth acknowledging about what Refugium Games actually attempted here. There genuinely are almost no games like Bully. The open-world high school life simulator is practically a genre of one, and the demand for something that scratches that itch has only grown as the years since 2006 have piled up. Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser confirmed the sequel never happened due to resource constraints, not disinterest. Rockstar even tried to get Bully 2 off the ground multiple times according to insider reports, and it never made it through development. The property is beloved and completely underserved.

Agefield High, for all its problems, understood the assignment at a conceptual level. An indie studio built an early 2000s open-world school game with class attendance, time management, social dynamics, and a mischievous teenage protagonist. The execution wasn’t there at launch, but the bones of what they were going for are genuinely what Bully fans have been asking for. If patches continue to improve stability and the PS5 version arrives in a cleaner state, there’s a version of this game that’s a flawed but enjoyable $27.49 way to spend a weekend feeling like you’re back in 2006. That’s not nothing when the alternative is waiting for a Bully 2 that Rockstar has shown zero interest in making. You can check out some of the other big gaming releases landing around the same time, including the Blackwood Steam launch on September 16 and Bethesda’s full Fallout 5 roadmap, to see what else is competing for your gaming budget this fall.

Should You Buy Agefield High on PS5?

Honestly, it depends on how much you’ve been craving anything close to a Bully experience. If your expectations are calibrated to a polished AAA release, stay away — this isn’t that game, and it was never going to be. If you can get into the headspace of a scrappy indie title that genuinely loves the Bully formula and has been actively patching itself toward a better state, the PS5 version at $27.49 might be worth a shot — especially given that console launches typically benefit from the PC version’s lessons.

The game has 32 main missions, a complete story with two different endings, a fully explorable open world with side activities, and all the early 2000s aesthetic touches that make the setting feel distinct. If even half of the mission structure works cleanly in the PS5 build, and the combat holds together better than it did at PC launch, there’s fun to be had here for fans of the genre. But going in with realistic expectations is essential. This is the closest thing to Bully 2 that exists right now — not because it’s as good as Bully, but because nothing else has even tried. For a certain kind of player, that counts for a lot. Games like this don’t come along often, and the broader gaming landscape rewards studios that swing for underserved niches — just look at how Wardogs: Bulkhead became a Steam sensation by doing something nobody else was doing. Refugium Games had that same instinct with Agefield High — the execution just needs to catch up with the vision. Keep an eye on post-launch reviews for the PS5 version before pulling the trigger, and check back to see how it holds up once players get their hands on it. Also worth a look while you wait: the Zelda Ocarina of Time remake hyrule map details that have been generating serious buzz, and Prime 1 Studio’s Street Fighter 6 Chun-Li statue for the collectors out there.