- 3RD-STRIKE.COM - A La Une - 18/Jul 04:44

JDM: Japanese Drift Master – Review

What do you get when you mix narrow mountain roads, Eurobeat, and a story about a newcomer chasing drift glory in Japan? If the first thing that comes to mind is The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, it’d be close but no cigar. We’re actually talking about JDM: Japanese Drift Master, a game that wears its cultural inspirations proudly on its carbon fiber sleeve. But does the game stick its landing like a perfectly linked hairpin, or drift out on the first corner? Let’s take it for a spin. Story The story of JDM is the classic outsider-rising-to-the-top narrative. Protagonist Touma is a European who moves to Japan with the goal of becoming a top-tier drift racer. What unfolds from this premise is a paper-thin, cookie-cutter plot. The story is rife with every cliche you can imagine, from Tomasz having to deal with xenophobia from the Japanese racers to delivering sushi and dealing with yakuza. There are plenty of side story threads here, but they are never tied together meaningfully, resulting in a narrative that feels tonally inconsistent. The only saving grace of JDM’s story is the way it is presented, in the form of manga panels. This is aesthetically pleasing and fits the Japanese theming of the game, but it also adds to the feeling of disconnect between the narrative and the actual gameplay. Granted, JDM is an entry in a genre that is typically devoid of stories altogether. While JDM’s story doesn’t really add anything substantial to the game, it doesn’t detract from the package either and can easily be ignored. Graphics The fictional prefecture that JDM is set in feels like a condensed version of every Japanese movie backdrop ever made. To the game’s credit, this provides the perfect excuse for tons of environmental variety, whether it’s neon-lit cities, cherry blossom-lined mountain roads, castles, or rural towns. The art direction is to notch, as JDM’s world offers plenty of cinematic vistas. As for the actual cars, not only do these look good, but thanks to an extensive range of customization options, you can really make your vehicles look as subtle or outrageous as you want. Body kits, underglow, spoilers, rims, gearshifts, and interiors can all be customized to your liking. JDM absolutely nails its aesthetics. Visual performance isn’t always quite up to snuff, however. Occasionally, the game looks grainy or even washed out, and the game’s frame rate isn’t as smooth as we would have wanted. Sound With JDM’s story being presented as a manga, the game avoids the need to include any kind of voice acting. Instead, music takes centre stage in JDM’s soundscape. The game features multiple in-game radio stations, allowing you to pick your own genre of tunes. These include obvious contenders like J-Pop and Japanese hip hop, but metal and Eurobeat are also on the menu. Standard sound effects like humming engines and screeching tires are appropriate enough, but the game is lacking when it comes to background ambience. Cities in particular feel eerily empty because you can’t hear the typical hustle and bustle associated with urban areas. Gameplay As the full title indicates, JDM is a drifting game, a specific subgenre of racing games. The focus is on drifting first and foremost. There are two distinct control modes: arcade and simcade. Arcade is the more forgiving and accessible one of the two, with simcade offering a more nuanced and realistic experience. Rather than the wide lanes typical of racing games, the game makes use of realistic, narrow roads, and precision drifting is required. In practice, this is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, mastering drifting feels genuinely skillful, and long chains of linked drifts are thrilling and rewarding. On the other hand, the game’s scoring system punishes you harshly: spinning out or bumping traffic resets your multiplier, and this penalty is applied inconsistently. The meat of JDM is in its narrative campaign, which offers roughly 12 hours’ worth of drifting gameplay. It follows the familiar structure of starting out as a rookie drift racer, gradually improving both his skills and his car. Performing well in the campaign missions nets you cash, which you can use to build out your car. There is a surprising amount of variety when it comes to the game’s missions, especially when you consider the side-missions, which include things like sushi delivery and underground events where you can bet on your drift score. Ironically, the basic grip races are the worst part of the campaign. JDM’s AI opponents are clumsy and often crash into you here, and any drift-tuning you’ve done to your car is useless here, which is odd given how drifting is the game’s main focus. Despite its different mission types and a sizable 250 km open world, JDM still feels limited, mostly due to sparse side content and a lack of gameplay modes beyond the main narrative campaign. After an extended time in Early Access, JDM had its full 1.0 release in late May of this year, after targeting a March release. Even with this extra development time, the 1.0 version of JDM feels very incomplete. While the game has online leaderboards, there is no online multiplayer here, or even local multiplayer for that matter. This is allegedly on the way, alongside a photo mode. We can overlook the absence of the latter mode, but not having multiplayer in a game like this seriously hurts its appeal. As it stands, the €34.99 price point is difficult to justify, simply because of how incomplete JDM currently feels. This is something that should remedy itself as the game receives more content updates. Conclusion If the current build of JDM was labelled as still being in Early Access, we’d be far more forgiving, but considering this is the official full release, we can’t help but feel underwhelmed. The game is severely lacking in content, and what is present suffers from a lack of consistency and polish. JDM’s drifting mechanics are great, to be fair, but the game comes up short in most other areas. If the game has piqued your interest, that’s totally justified, but we’d hold off from picking it up until after it has received some love from the developers.