When JDM: Japanese Drift Master launched on PC in May 2025, i was kind of excited. The trailers promised an open-world celebration of Japan’s countryside roads, of misty mountain passes, with a fairly accurate rendition of what Japan actually looks like. I was cautiously optimistic but now, after having spent good time with the game, the reality hit me hard like a slap in the face. It’s far from meeting my expectations.

What JDM delivers, in its current state, feels like an unfinished prototype, with shiny graphics taking advantage of the latest Unreal Engine advances. But the game simply doesn’t work. And driving, which is the core gameplay of the game, is deeply flawed and unsatisfying.

Physics Don’t Work Like That

If you are an actual driver, or if you have played a lot of racing games, you will be struck by how unfamiliar the experience feels in JDM. Drifting, supposedly the entire point of JDM, never clicks. Cars push heavily into corners, driven by constant understeer. Power delivery is confusing: throttle inputs send the rear wheels spinning like they’re on ice. Why has your car no grip whatsoever on the road??!

The game rewards you for drifting - during quests you need to reach a certain threshold during the duration of the quest to pass it. And you are encourage to drift the whole time in order to make the most points. You have a straight line? Don’t drive straight man, just wiggle left and right and drift you way along the straight line because you make more points this way! That is completely, utterly stupid, and does not reward style or technique, but drifting like a drunk driver on steroids.

Of course, you can get used to it. Just like you can get used to brushing teeth with your nails, I guess. The problem is that driving never gets into a sweet spot where it feels intuitive, where you feel like you are actually in control. I remember times in Gran Turismo or even Forza where, after dozens of hours of practice, you start to feel the sense of flow. You manage to make perfect laps. Not so much in JDM - or maybe my brain just does not understand how this actually works. It’s not just challenging — it’s incoherent.

I thought that maybe the game is not made to be played with a gamepad. Then I checked what people with racing wheels were saying, and they were not so happy either, with force feedback that feels like a feature added at the very last minute.

Compared to established titles like Assetto Corsa or even Forza Horizon, JDM doesn’t sit anywhere comfortably. It’s not a pure sim, not an arcade racer, and not a fun in-between. It’s something stuck in limbo, unsure of what it’s trying to be. When I think of drifting, the closest game I can think about is the Dirt series, but Dirt knows exactly how to make driving fun yet challenging at the same time. Dirt 3 for example has drifting challenges that make you feel like Ken Block (RIO). JDM makes me feel like it’s Bozo the clown at the wheel.

Technically Poor

The game is fairly taxing on your machine. It does not look bad. The car models are fine, for most of them. Most of the map is made of small roads, that you do see a lot in Japan. This would be the ideal stage for a rally game, but this is not what JDM is going for. Sadly, the frame rate is extremely inconsistant. Sometimes you are hitting 60 fps just fine, and all of a sudden, because of more geometry coming in, you see stutters or even the framerate drop massively to handle the new elements on screen. It screams a lack of optimization. It’s not like the devs had to wait to see user reports to notice, it was obvious after playing for 5 minutes. So they shipped the game as is, knowing full well this was a problem.

Some objects are destructible (hitting a light pole at almost any speed will bring it down to the ground like a pin), while some others stop you like a wall in your tracks. Size, materials are no good indicators, so you want to avoid touching anything at the end of the day. This kind of behavior is stressful or frustration. I’m not asking the game to be like Forza Horizon where your car is like a fucking bulldozer and destroys brick walls like it’s butter, but come on! There’s a good balance in between.

On the Steam Deck, the game performs pretty badly overall, and you need to go at the lowest settings to be able to run things OK. At such settings it does not look or run great, and looks much worse than other racing games that can run on the Steam Deck with the same hardware. So this is not a game I’d enjoy playing on the go. It’s rated as playable but this is another case where the rating is not to be trusted. Playable, at the litteral sense of the word, but far from pleasurable.

Add to that extremely long loading times, that almost made me wonder if the game was installed on a HDD instead of a NVME drive. That bad. Don’t ask me why it’s loading forever, I have no idea. Again, this is a clear lack of optimization, and the devs have knowingly shipped it like that.

Engine sounds are not great. They tend to sound dull and generic, and this is a shame as the models look believable but their engines don’t seem to match the real thing. It’s a hard problem (many games did it poorly back in the days), but this is pretty much the level of detail you expect from this kind of games in 2025.

Fake Manga

The game lets you play in some kind of open map, going from one quest to the next with side missions available, such as the (cursed) sushi delivery. I say open map and not open world, since most roads are pretty much gated by fences or obstacles, preventing you from exploring other areas.

The game won’t really let you drive freely everywhere. There’s traffic on roads, but the AI that takes care of that is buggy and inconsistent, and glitches. Sometimes cars stop in the middle for no reason. This is a problem as this makes the immersion a lot worse.

Some missions are introduced by black and white manga pages (actual manga) that reads from right to left (because, you know, you have to make it look like you are in Japan) except that they use English instead of Japanese (I guess you can’t be too much like Japan then). My main problem is that the manga is cheesy, and the art is awful too. Not sure who they outsourced this to, but it does not look like any actual professional manga art you’d find in Japan.

That’s like the game as a whole: It pretends to give you an authentic feel, but it misses the mark in many ways.

Not impressed

JDM: Japanese Drift Master is one of those games that started with a good idea and could have really made a difference in a world dominated by very well known racing game series. The map and the details of the little roads and countryside houses are beautiful. The Japanese cars are legendary. But under the hood, it’s a clear failure. The physics don’t work, the driving and drifting is not fun, and the “open world” is more closed than it looks. Quests and the poor looking manga and the uninteresting storyline are not helping you to come back asking for more.

There’s definitely a game that needs to glorify the Japanese racing car culture, but my bet is that that game will eventually come from a Japanese developer if anything.

Too bad. I am sure a lot of work went into this, but this is typically exactly what Early Access is for. Too bad JDM skipped that step. It’s nowhere at the level of polish you’d expect from a full featured game. The developers are still very active, so not all hope is lost, but they have a mountain to climb, and some design decisions that would need to be reconsidered. It might be too late.

Note: we received a key from the publisher for this review.