JDM: Japanese Drift Master Review
Blog Andrew Joseph 25 May , 2025 0
Japan may be the birthplace and spiritual hub of drifting culture, but Poland is home to the incredible Bartosz Ostalowski. After losing his arms in an accident, he became a professional wanderer and the only professional sports driver in the world who used him foot. So, on paper, of course, JDM: The Japanese drift master was conceived and produced in Central Europe, which may be a bit inconsistent. But this is not unprecedented, it is also a simple matter geography Obviously, it is obviously not going to stop the Warsaw-based developer game factory, blending this sublime ode to the Japanese side turns, emitting white smoke and looking cool in doing so. JDM is a good drift racer with an easy and approachable manipulation model for oversteering. It also has a great map – it's full of striking and authentic details. However, it is also currently ruined by the very bad grip racing mode, wonky AI and uneven difficulty, and it seems a bit like a project car that is already on track before it is finished.
JDM is a story-based open-world racer located in a fictional Japanese segment with 250km of roads – from dense urban grids and highways to narrow highways, winding mountain passes and flower-lined trails. It's hard to get Accurate Map size comparisons compared to the test drive Infinite Solar Crown, Crew or Forza Horizon 5, but JDM is definitely Smaller than any one on the whole.
That said, it is not more compact than its open-world racing counterparts. If anything, its map might just be its biggest win.
Good cherries
JDM's map is the most beautiful and is a real display. The trees are pink, and the quaint small town on the Central Lake is full of characteristics and charm. However, its main advantage is that it sticks to a more realistic road width than we find in other open world games.
Developers often choose wider streets to make us more forgiving the tarmac ribbons for races as it makes it more overtaking and navigating through civilian traffic. JDM deviates from this philosophy towards narrow and more challenging paths, and they often remind me of more rallying phases than traditional open-world racers. Several connected hair angle sequences are a particular highlight. For games like JDM, they are absolutely essential and the game factory has been delivered.
Making the road network more cramped, meaning you need to brake and braid in rural traffic instead of simply burning the center, like the game you can use on luxurious wide driveways to keep NPC vehicles far apart. That's true Technically speaking Reduce the overall speed of JDM, but the good news is that there is still a very effective sense of speed in fact. Thanks to the narrow road, everything is whipped quickly based on pure proximity. JDM is an arcade racer – definitely not a hardcore drift simulator – but I like to challenge patiently, but surely reduce traffic and thread my car through tricky and tight gaps. Its requirements are required in different ways, at least helping to set JDM apart.
That said, sometimes traffic is a little thicker than the expectations of the countryside – especially considering that the main cities feel surprisingly dead compared to the main cities, with large empty streets and few cars moving. At night, the lighting was also a little wrong. NPC headlights are far away. Distant Too boring, which means oncoming cars will only appear when you are close to it. And, no matter the time of day, AI cars on the highway have a weird quirk, and when you approach from behind, you automatically pull all the traffic left, just like you're a Sirens Blazing ambulance. I know my GT-R is very ill, but that doesn't mean I'm going to the hospital.
There are some other obvious problems. My system (RTX 4080, Intel Core Ultra 9 185H) performs to a large extent, but sometimes I have some detectable stuttering. On the naked eye, it seems more reliable as the framework is generated off and the FPS is set to 60.
Even though, even with it aside, after driving for a few days, I still feel like I haven't solved what roadside objects can be destroyed and what are impossible. Sometimes I can slap in big posts, and sometimes small obstacles stop me altogether. You'd better just try not to collide with anything, as JDM usually doesn't handle crashes well anyway. The bumps and quarrels tend to throw away and tilt the car in strange ways.
For clarity, some of these issues may be addressed soon based on the list of known issues provided by the game factory, but for the moment they are positive frustration.
Drift horse
However, a bigger problem is the unbalanced difficulty of JDM – any time the story avoids actual drifting so much that it does a good job. To be clear, most of its tasks are drift-themed, which is definitely the best because that's the purpose of processing. There are two settings for processing models: Arcade and Simcade. The Simcade has a more subtle feeling – it may lack the soft help of arcade mode, and I can feel the car stable and obedient during the drift – but overall the difference between the two is not particularly deep.
From attending an approved event on one of the area’s dedicated tracks to offering a larger-cost dinner, it depends on how sushi gets a larger-cost dinner on the way. The scoring requirements for drift tasks are tolerant and I rarely find myself needing to repeat them. They are mainly a very relaxing challenge, but I am happy with it.
It’s frustrating that drifting is not the main goal at any time, things will be significant. JDM is very unhappy with Grip Racing’s view and proves to be a real bottleneck for a while, with AI opponents driving straight into (sometimes even below) you and other racers, just like you’re not even there. Forgot to bring the rear-wheel drive car to any of these races; in my case, the AI is galloping like a Scalextric car when I try to bring any drive from the corner. Just buy cheap front-wheel drive Honda Civic and Plonk, and you can get any upgrades. You won't know if it's fast enough until you try it, because there's no real sign of the performance level of your opponent's car in these races.
JDM is not a real communicator, and that doesn't help. In other cases, the upcoming mission was marked as a drift event, but it was actually a game that required me to catch (or escape) my opponent. It's a mean bait and switch because for these events, drift builds are absolutely impractical. Smoking may seem flashy, but it is by no means the fastest way to go from A to B. These events require a path. Things shot out from corners such as stabbed mice. It is a total waste of time to suggest that you should appear with drifting construction. It's like asking you to catch up with Russell Westbrook on a basketball court with fresh crayons on your socks. So I bought the all-wheel drive NSX and never looked back. It easily surpasses AI.
But it’s not until you drive there and fundamentally get away from the classification that you know you’re bringing a hopeless car. By then the only thing to do is exit, rebirth in your nearest garage, choose a new ride, and then go back all the time (because fast travel in JDM is limited to jumping between garages). I mostly don’t have to drive to attend new events because if I’m not happy with the car, I won’t be here in the first place, but I do feel annoyed in these situations.
As a story-driven racer, JDM combines all its activities with regular, comic-style graphic novel pages (even from right to left), just like Japanese comics). It's not my scene – I don't have a history of meaningfulness with comics, and I quickly lost track of who all the characters are – but I appreciate it as a cute and branded way, even if it's very cheesy, and very cheesy, and fun. The last time I was surprised by a racing driver story, I was watching the Thunder, and Tom Cruise tried to pop up a sweet little package to Nicole Kidman's crot feet.
No, I'm here for the car, and while there are only over 20 recognized options compared to my big budget peers, the garage does hit some key notes. For independent racers, it is honest that these cars are largely licensed. Honda, Nissan, Mazda and Subaru are all officially coming, adding a lot of crucial credibility to the overall love letter JDM is trying to write here. Performance and internal/external customization are a big feature and there are a lot of parts to earn and install. From such a small developer, speed reduction is needed. Anyway, I tend to make my car more low-key – but if you want Katana gears, you can keep going.
Ranked Japan's most iconic car Marquis in cool order
Ranked Japan's most iconic car Marquis in cool order
After about 10 hours of story, collect the remaining cars, make modifications and cruis in solos, which is largely left. There are some sushi delivery tasks and “underground” drift events where you can bet on a few points you think you score, and that's it. It just won't force me to stick with it. The game factory is expected to get more modes over the next nine months, such as expanded driving schools, more tasks, photo modes and split-screen screens (this is important as there is no online multiplayer game). However, the side effect of all these plans is that it makes JDM feel like it isn't really done, and much like early access games, it's actually not yet confirmed.