Developer Salve Games and publisher QUByte Interactive have an old-school looking bit of driving/shooting action now with Music Drive: Chase the Beat.

“Music is the most valuable asset in the world, and hard drives filled with unreleased tracks have been stolen by a gang that wants to monopolize the charts. It’s up to you to recover them!”

In this music-inspired game, you play as two characters, Tina and Tunner (get it?). Tina is the driver and Tunner is the gunman. With music being such an important commodity in the game, combining the skills of both characters to hunt down stolen music and deliver it for a ton of money. Did you ever play the arcade classic, Chase H.Q.? Or maybe a more apt comparison would be its sequel, Special Criminal Investigation, because that’s basically how Music Drive: Chase the Beat plays.

The thing that instantly hit me with Music Drive: Chase the Beat was the visuals. The game put me in mind of titles like Virtua Cop with low polygon, pixelated graphics and stilted animations. I don’t mean that in a bad way either, I loved it. Very much that mid-’90s, early 3D polygon age. Now, you can turn the pixelization off in the game and this does give the graphics a more polished, but still old-school look. The other thing that hit me was the music. With music being a driving (no pun) force of the game’s story, the tunes here are from Brazilian musician NP Vocal, and they’re pretty damn great.

But how does Music Drive: Chase the Beat play? before I get into that, let me explain how it all works. There are two gameplay modes, you have Pursuit and here, you have to chase down vehicles, destroy them and grab music cassette tapes (these were old recording media that could hold music and even videogames, for the younger readers). The other mode is Delivery and pretty much covers exactly what you need to do, you deliver the tapes you just obtained.

Complete the tasks for money and then use that money to buy and upgrade vehicles and weapons. Rinse and repeat. As this is a game that is massively inspired by old arcade titles, the gameplay is quite shallow, but that does not mean it is not fun. Going back to my Special Criminal Investigation and Virtua Cop comparisons from earlier, I used to play those games for hours on end, even though the gameplay was basic. Simple can be immense fun and Music Drive: Chase the Beat is exactly that.

You control the driving and the shooting is done automatically. Race through the locales, catch up with target vehicles and ram into them, or let Tunner do the shooting. As I said before, it’s all very Chase H.Q/Special Criminal Investigation inspired. The gameplay for both the Pursuit and Delivery modes are the same, but it is the risk and rewards that make the difference. The pay of Pursuit is quite low, so is the risk. But the pay for Delivery is higher, as are the risks. The more you play, the higher your haters meter gets. Think of this kind of like the GTA 5-star wanted level. It’s the same thing, going up to 5 stars, but instead of the police coming after you like in GTA, the enemies in the game become more aggressive and the difficulty increases. You can decrease the hater meter by spending some cash. And so, you have to go out in Pursuit mode to earn some spending money and to obtain music tapes. Then, head out on Delivery to earn some real cash. Different tapes have different monetary values and you can even listen to the music yourself. The basic gameplay loop is simple and it does feel very arcadey.

The progression can get very grindy as you will have to play and replay the same levels over and over to gain money to spend on upgrades and such. I think this is an element that will rub some people up the wrong way. I do have a handful of issues with the game myself. First, the menu navigation feels very stiff, awkward and there is a lack of information as to what each icon is for. You kind of just have to highlight something and press the button to find out what it does. When driving, you can get your vehicle stuck quite easily and I couldn’t find a way to reset it (the lack of info on the menus thing). The game uses very few buttons and given the number of them on modern controllers, the devs could’ve had an option to hold down a button to reset your car on the road.

The maps themselves are quite short and very linear. Nothing wrong with a bit of linearity at all, but the trailer does show some jumping action and a bit of fence crashing too. This is the issue, there is only a bit of that kind of stuff. Still keeping things linear, they could’ve had more jumps, more crashing through scenery and so on, to add to the excitement. The levels do become increasingly complex as you progress through the game but they still never do reach that level of chaos that could’ve lifted the gameplay up. Back to the linear levels, I think some deviation and alternate routes would’ve added some longevity and interest, given the fact that you play and reply the same maps over and over so much.

Still, my personal grumbles aside, Music Drive: Chase the Beat does offer some fun, old-school gameplay that wouldn’t feel out of place in the arcades around 1995. You can finish the game in around an hour or so, but you’ll have to play a while longer to unlock all of the vehicles, weapons and upgrades. Given the style of game, an hour to the end credits is about right. We used to blast through Virtua Cop in under 30 minutes… but would keep coming back for more. Music Drive: Chase the Beat definitely has that “one more go” vibe and as I write this review, even though I have completed the game 100%, I can feel that pull to get me back into the game already. It’s like Virtua Cop and Chase H.Q. had a baby that was born in the arcades in 1995.

The foundations have been set, but I feel that Music Drive: Chase the Beat could do better and a sequel could truly be a thing of old-school beauty, but with some modern refinements. Available now for everything and with a budget price of less than £10, this should be on your “to play” list if you’re an older gamer, like me, that misses those ’90s arcade days. I also learned that I quite like Brazilian hip-hop music.