JDM: Japanese Drift Master Review: Not Quite Complete

First impressions count, and JDM: Japanese Drift Master starts strongly – this open-world street racer set in Japan has real-world cars, customisation, a lengthy single-player story and a spectacular location. It’s time to fire up the Teriyaki Boyz…

Erm, not so fast… mainly due to music copyright reasons and also because Tokyo Drift keeps hold of its Japanese street racing mantle. This game isn’t quite the complete, rounded experience we were expecting.

You play Tomasz Stanowski, or Touma for short, who has been ostracised from Europe on account of a revoked driving licence. Arriving in the fictionalised location of Guntama, you must integrate into Japanese society and rise through the ranks of the local drift racing scene.

But the narrative isn’t the impressive opening, it’s the environment that takes the lead role.

Narrow roads littered with kei cars, typical buildings and roadside bicycles, all rendered in Unreal Engine 5 glory. The cherry blossom pops in the afternoon sun, the quaint architecture glinting in the evening lighting, while thunder claps during a storm.

Car life

The cars are modelled in the same exacting detail across 27 drivable examples, with a mix of real and fake – although the Yotsuhoshi’s are clearly Mitsubishi’s and the Alpha Moriyamo is a Toyota AE86.

Interiors are a particular highlight, accurately recreated and heavily customisable – items such as wheel rims, seats and shifters can be changed, and all modifications can be viewed when racing through the streets.

Your driver avatar, and any passengers depending on career levels (more on that later), is animated in the car, as is arm-over-arm opposite lock as you slew sideways through a corner – something some other open-world driving games struggle with.

Handling

In the approachable and recommended for gamepad players, arcade handling mode, simply aiming at a corner will see the rear of your car pivot into an easy-to-control drift, tyres billowing smoke. There is a ‘simcade’ physics system too, and wheel support, for the hardcore. The number of wheels natively supported is small, more are expected, and you can map custom inputs for most devices in our testing, albeit without much feedback.

But, it’s resolutely not a drifting simulation and it’s perhaps best played kicking back with a controller.

Chaining one hairpin turn to the next, exploring villages and smashing against the rev limiter in your entry-level coupe is joyous. The evocative settings combined with the pretty visuals, pumping soundtrack and silky smooth drifts deliver an endorphin rush tantamount to a child exploring a theme park. It all looks so exciting!

Irrisistibly clippable for TikTok, especially when using the wide-angle GoPro-style viewpoint, this is JDM: Japanese Drift Master at its best.

Promising start, fades

However…

If JDM would like to be taken seriously as a video game, as opposed to a social media clip factory, there needs to be depth beneath the pretty visuals. And, as it stands right now, there isn’t enough substance.

It’s like a Japanese restaurant adorned with paper lanterns, inscribed chopsticks, and then serving supermarket meal deal sushi.

We’ll start with the visuals, because outside of the pretty villages and onto the dedicated drift and race venues, there is detail pop-in like a PS2-era Grand Theft Auto game. At night, the traffic doesn’t appear to have bright headlights, or is running on sidelights and can be difficult to spot.

Still, we can forgive a bit of this, hoping for further optimisation soon, but what is less acceptable is AI rival behaviour more mercurial than Taki Inoue.

If it’s a side-by-side drift event, they drive slower than a Honda Jazz owner, and score few points – each is a complete walkover. But then you’ll turn up at the Tsukuba-aping Tsugoya track and they behave like they are slot cars, driving clean around the outside of you. Sadly, your opponents are incapable of delivering a close race.

In one mission against some kind of American muscle car, it disappeared up the road, clearly using different physics to toboggan around turns.

You can alter your car setup to a nerdy degree, but we think that for most casual players, a slider like Need for Speed Unbound between grip and drift settings would help here.

Purchasing an all-wheel drive car just for these events is also an option, but outside of the track, they are recalcitrant to turn, as if the physics are designed solely with rear-wheel drive in mind. You can, neatly, modify an AWD into an RWD, though.

The road traffic is also odd – bumbling around the tight streets with aplomb, but then mostly absent from the larger urban area, and they can only drive on the inside lane on the highways.

The setting, cars and handling could be put to good use in these sections to rival Tokyo Xtreme Racer or No Hesi, but as the freeway is barren, high-speed commutes are dull.

But wait, there’s more…

Still, at least there is a true sense of progression – grinding away to earn enough cash for a new vehicle, but more often than not, performance-enhancing parts and lurid paint schemes.

As the cars are so well modelled, engine sounds rorty and customisation plentiful, you end up building a bond with your main whip. As cash is relatively hard to come by, you will likely spend time with one model, gradually upgrading while saving up for something flashier like an NSX or Skyline GT-R.

There’s a car mastery system too, alongside your general XP-generated driver rank, that leans into this grind. The more you drive one car, the higher its level, the more items you unlock to add to it.

As a newcomer to the country, Touma meets a series of stereotypically glamorous women and men with pent-up aggression in a manga story that’s about as deep as an episode of Homes Under The Hammer.

Yet, as the pages flow, there is at least enough context to create your own sub-narrative as you compete in the challenges and tasks, wanting to succeed.

Your tasks are pleasantly varied too – there are the aforementioned circuit races, and side-by-side drift events, plus solo drift events, time and damage-based sushi delivery runs or even challenges to impress a passenger.

Frustratingly, however, points during these passenger events are only dished out for drifting. Other acts of heroism, such as reaching high speeds or driving close to traffic, don’t count. Yet, you must also reach a destination before a set time.

So you end up swapping from one side of the road to another down a motorway, and it’s a technique that seems to work for most missions, keeping your drift multiplier higher and sapping fun.

While there are different event types in the story, elsewhere in the world, there are also a handful of speed cameras, your garages, a training centre and a place to complete solo time trials around the tracks.

And… that’s it. No, really, that’s it.

Unlike something like Forza Horizon 5, there are no boards to smash, side events, online leaderboards or hidden objects – there is a menu that states “% of collectables found TBD” so presumably that’s a feature to be added post-release.

Information supplied to Traxion states that Illegal Racing, further Sushi Delivery (and difficulty levels) are coming post-release, and on the map, there are two areas labelled as ‘coming soon’.

It’s strange, as essentially right now all there is to play is the linear central narrative, which somehow makes it feel anything but open world. Loading from one mission to the next, with some commuting in between, repeat. The world isn’t populated enough by NPCs or side challenges to truly feel alive.

Missing features

Then we come back to the environment, as while you can knock over parked scooters, parked cars are cemented to the ground. Sometimes, you can drift through small fences, but then, right on an apex, you’ll hit an immovable barrier. Bushes are driven through with zero animation. This is a far cry from The Crew Motorfest’s destructability, for comparison.

Perhaps understandable for a contemporary driving game with licensed road cars set around public streets, there is no car damage, but there aren’t even light visual scrapes.

When it rains – commendably, there is a full day-to-night cycle and dynamic weather – no water hits the windscreen. The rearview mirror is not functional. A photo mode and replays are other notable absentees.

The GPS system to navigate between events is hopeless, something that also befell Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown at launch. Sometimes, you hit an invisible wall. Aside from the vibrant setting, car models and easy-drifting mechanics, the rest lacks polish.

Conclusion

You can tell that a dedicated team of hardworking individuals had a cool idea and have worked hard to try and pull it off. Kudos to creators Gaming Factory for creating something so enticing, but the final JDM: Japanese Drift Master release falters after the first hour.

If we rewind the clock to summer last year, it released a free prologue, which has since been deleted from Steam forever. This bite-sized taster, called Rise of the Scorpion, with only part of the map, was promising.

Now, it seems the full game hasn’t taken the necessary steps to entertain throughout the full 15-20-hour experience.

JDM is not an early access release, but if there are some AI and visual optimisations, further side quests added and possible console versions created – all of which are promised –  then we’ll happily reassess.

For now, it’s a six out of 10.

JDM: Japanese Drift Master releases for PC on 21st May 2025 via Steam, GOG and Epic Games Store – a final price was not yet available at the time of review, although a third-party key site lists it somewhere between 20 and 30 dollars.

Update: A launch-day patch has added new sushi delivery missions and underground patch since our review was published. Gaming Factory has also revealed new content players can look forward to in a nine-month roadmap.

Score: 6/10

Fun driving, but lacking cohesion

JDM: Japanese Drift Master price

JDM: Japanese Drift Master is available now, priced at £24.64 / $29.74 / 29,74€