While there are plenty of indie games that have a distinctive and unmistakable flavor to them, there are also those where it can honestly be hard to say precisely what they’re shooting for. That isn’t to say that you can’t understand what style of gameplay you’re engaged in, just that it can be so watered down, simple, or even ambiguous that it comes through as generic in some way rather than polished. 

Going by its name, you’d think that Music Drive: Chase the Beat could be some sort of interesting mix of rhythm and racing in some way… a combination that could have real potential. Sadly, that isn’t the case, and instead you just have a mix of pretty uninspired driving action, vehicular mayhem that you sadly have minimal control over, and the music is just sort of there, not tied to what’s going on in any particular way. Before each relatively brief mission you’ll get to choose between the game’s two modes that have different goals, but that ultimately play very similarly. First there’s Pursuit, where your goal will be to wreck specified cars in order to retrieve new tapes, needing to take down a variety of other thugs in other cars and along the road in the process. The other option is Delivery, where you can gamble on how many of the tapes you’ve collected you’ll be able to deliver, before getting overwhelmed.

In both cases you’ll hit relatively short and very statically-defined stretches of road where you’ll hope your companion who is doing the shooting will take out enemy cars before they can get you, and collect any money you may see. While you could say the driving has an arcade-like quality to go with its very PS1 era looks, that would be over-selling the action honestly. It may be playable, but the controls are pretty sloppy and uninspired, with you mostly just trying to get down alleyways or hit jumps to get some extra cash, but otherwise pretty well at the mercy of the RNG gods and simple repetitive grinding, to continue to upgrade your ride and your weapon, to try to be able to survive longer and take on later stages.

That’s honestly about all there is to it though, and it pretty quickly gets tiresome due to its bland and repetitive predictability. There’s very little you can do to improve your luck on missions outside of getting better gear, and given the penalty for failing being that you’ll lose the tapes in your inventory the tendency will be to grind so you can over-prepare, looking to win through brute force rather than leaving an avenue to success more through skill. It all plays out like it’s somewhat incomplete, with a few aspects of a final game idea in play in a partial state, but lacking any clear element to help it stand out, and that’s before even taking issue with its complete lack of polish.