Skid through Japan’s underground one car at a time in JDM: Japanese Drift Master Review.
The moment you fire up JDM: Japanese Drift Master, you can immediately feel the thrill of an open-world street racer set in Japan. In the game, you take on the role of Thomas Stanowski, known as Toma, who arrives in the fictionalized locale of Gintama after having his European driving license revoked.
From the outset, JDM: Japanese Drift Master immerses you in its spectacular environment: narrow roads lined with key cars, typical buildings, and roadside bicycles, all rendered in Unreal Engine 5 glory. As you explore the game’s world, the cherry blossoms pop in the afternoon sun, the quaint architecture glints in the evening lighting, and thunder claps during a storm, giving you a sense that the game isn’t just a game but an atmospheric experience you can feel.
In JDM: Japanese Drift Master, you get access to 27 drivable cars, a mix of real and fictional names. You’ll notice that the Yatsuhosi models are clearly Mitsubishi, and the Alfa Moramo channels the spirit of the Toyota A86. Interiors in the game are a particular highlight, as they are accurately recreated and heavily customizable.
You can change wheel rims, seats, and shifters, and see all modifications reflected when you’re tearing through the streets. Your driver avatar, animated convincingly in JDM: Japanese Drift Master, throws in realistic arm-over-opposite-lock motions as you slide sideways through corners—something many open-world racers struggle to depict convincingly.
If you’re holding a controller, JDM: Japanese Drift Master’s arcade handling mode will feel approachable and recommended. Aim at a corner, and the rear of your car pivots into an easy-to-control drift, with tires billowing smoke in the game’s signature style. For those seeking more realism, the game also offers a “sim-cade” physics system and wheel support, though, at launch, only a small number of wheels are supported.
You can, however, map custom inputs for most devices, albeit without haptic feedback. Despite these options, the game remains resolutely not a drifting simulation; you’ll find it most rewarding when kicking back with a controller, chaining hairpins, exploring villages, and smashing the rev limiter in your entry-level coupe.
The evocative settings, pretty visuals, pumping soundtrack, and silky-smooth drifts in the game deliver an endorphin rush akin to a child exploring a theme park. It all looks so exciting and irresistibly clippable for your social media channels—especially when using the wide-angle GoPro-style viewpoint that the game offers.
However, if you want JD: Japanese Drift Master to be more than just a social-media clip factory, you’ll hope for more substance beneath the visuals. At present, the game feels like a traditional Japanese restaurant, adorned with paper lanterns and inscribed chopsticks, but it serves supermarket-quality sushi.
Visually, outside of the picturesque villages and dedicated drift venues, JD: Japanese Drift Master delivers details that pop like an early PS2-era Grand Theft Auto game at night. Yet, traffic vehicles often lack bright headlights and realistic behavior in the larger urban areas of the game. You might forgive some optimization issues in the game, but what’s less forgivable is the AI rival behavior, which is more mercurial than reliable.
In side-by-side drift events, AI in JDM: Japanese Drift Master may drive slower than a Honda Jazz owner, handing you an easy victory, but then morph into slot-car perfection at the Sukuba track, maintaining a clean racing line that leaves you questioning the consistency of the game’s physics.
Your opponents in the game rarely deliver a close race. In one mission featuring an American muscle car, the rival disappeared up the road, seemingly using different physics settings from your ride. While you can tweak your car’s setup in the game to a nerdy degree, most casual players would welcome a simple slider—akin to Need for Speed Unbound’s grip-drift balance—to help tune Japanese Drift Master’s handling.
Purchasing an all-wheel-drive car for specific events is an option in the game, but outside the track, they handle as if the Game’s physics are designed solely for rear-wheel drive. You can, however, modify an AWD car into RWD, and the game lets you play creatively with your drivetrain preferences.
Road traffic behavior in the game is also odd: NPC cars bumble around tight streets but are almost absent from larger urban areas, and they stick to the inside lane on highways. You might think these sections are perfect for Tokyo Extreme Racer–style competition, but in JDM: Japanese Drift Master, the freeway is barren, making high-speed commutes dull rather than thrilling. Would you consider this a crucial aspect of a drifting game?
Fortunately, the game does offer a genuine sense of progression. You grind to earn cash for new vehicles, performance-enhancing parts, and custom paint schemes. Because cars are so well modeled, with authentic engine sounds and plentiful customization, you end up bonding with your primary vehicle of choice in Japanese Drift Master.
Cash can be hard to come by, so you’ll likely spend a long time upgrading one model before saving up for flashier rides like the NSX or a Skyline GTR. The game even features a car mastery system: the more you drive one car, the higher its level and the more unlockable items you receive.
As you level up in JDM: Japanese Drift Master’s narrative, Toma meets a cast of stereotypically glamorous characters—men and women with pent-up aggression—in a manga-style story that’s about as deep as an episode of Homes Under the Hammer. Yet, the game provides just enough context for you to create your subnarrative as you compete in varied challenges.
You’ll tackle circuit races, side-by-side drift events, solo drift trials, time- and damage-based sushi delivery runs, and even passenger-impressing challenges. The game’s mission variety keeps things interesting, although the passenger events only reward drifting points; other feats, such as reaching high speeds or evading traffic, don’t count. You must also get to a destination before a set time, so you end up swapping lanes on a motorway to keep your drift multiplier high—but this technique can feel more like a chore than fun in the game.
Across the game’s open world, you’ll find a handful of speed cameras, garages, a training center, and solo time-trial tracks. Unlike Forza Horizon 5, JDM: Japanese Drift Master lacks boards to smash, side events, online leaderboards, or hidden collectibles—though a menu hints at collectibles coming in an update. Information supplied by Traction Studios promises illegal racing, further sushi runs, and difficulty levels post-release.
Two areas on the map are labeled as “coming soon,” reinforcing that the game, while marketed as an open world, feels like a linear central narrative with motorway commutes in between missions. The world isn’t yet populated enough by NPCs or side challenges to feel truly alive in the game.
You can knock over parked scooters in the game, but parked cars are cemented to the ground. Small fences sometimes yield to your drift, but you’ll also hit immovable barriers at the apex, and bushes provide zero resistance or animation.
Compared to The Crew Motorfest’s destructibility, the game’s environment feels static. Understandably, public-street–licensed car games often forego destructibility, but the game doesn’t even offer light visual damage or scrapes when you collide. On the plus side, the game boasts a complete day-to-night cycle and dynamic weather, though raindrops don’t hit the windscreen, and the rearview mirror is nonfunctional.
Photo mode and replays are absent, and the in-game GPS to navigate between events is hopeless—an issue Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown also faced at launch. You’ll occasionally crash into invisible walls in the game, which breaks immersion.
Even with these problems, you’ll keep coming back to the game because of its lively setting, realistic car models, and easy-to-understand drift controls. But the rest of JDM: Japanese Drift Master isn’t very polished, and it becomes clearer as you play. After the first hour, the game falls short of what it promised. You’ll want more AI depth, better graphics, and a wider range of side quests.
If you rewind to summer last year, you might recall the free prologue, Rise of the Scorpion, which offered a bite-sized taster of the JDM: Japanese Drift Master’s map. Now that the full game is released via Steam, GOG, and Epic Games Store, you can judge whether the team at Traction Studios has delivered on their promise of post-launch updates.
There is reason to be hopeful about JDM, as it will soon feature street racing, more challenging levels, and more collectibles. You’ll be excited to play JDM: Japanese Drift Master again if these promised features show up soon. Until then, JDM feels like a solid foundation that lacks the polish and depth to elevate it beyond its initial wow factor.
