The King of Sideways Action?
I love a JDM car, and that love goes back to when a family member got themselves an imported Nissan Skyline Gt-R (the R33 model, in case you are bothered) and took me for a spin up the A1 in it. The power, the performance, the noise, these all had a profound effect on me, and ever since then I’ve adored them.
JDM in this case stands for Japanese Domestic Market, and relates to cars that were originally designed to be sold only in Japan. Now there is a game that gives those three little letters a whole new meaning – JDM: Japanese Drift Master is a racing game that features, at it’s heart, the cars and culture of Japan. Coming to the Xbox from Gaming Factory, the game has been around on Steam since May of this year, and now is finally here.
Being a huge fan of drifting, I’m quite excited to slip behind the wheel and shred some poor unsuspecting tyres. Who’s with me?
Get sideways!
Manga, Mountains, and Mixed Presentation
Racing games don’t, as a rule, have stories per se, but luckily JDM: Japanese Drift Master tries to buck this trend. We are a young man who flies to Japan from Poland after we were banned in our home country’s racing series. If you have Fast & Furious: Tokyo Drift, then you pretty much know the story here: a gaijin gets under the skin of the locals, and has to prove himself out on the streets.
The cool thing about the story here is that it is presented in a manga style, with the comic panels being well drawn. I’m here for a story in a driving game, I have to say!
But what about the rest of the game? Well, the news here is somewhat mixed, sadly. The actual game itself, the cars and the scenery look amazing, and the map that we can drive around on reportedly has over 250 km of road to drive about on. The towns and mountain passes all look great, and the game seems to be fairly stable during races. There is a good number of innocent passing cars to avoid as we slide about, and with a day/night cycle and weather to deal with (rain drifting is quite a lot harder than sunny drifting, as you’d expect) JDM looks very good, most of the time.
Identity-less Engines
There are some issues, mind. If you have a little crash (which you will), sometimes the prompt to get back on track will not go away, even when you have got back to it; instead it stays on the left hand side of the screen, vibrating in a vaguely unpleasant way. Further, I’ve driven through the scenery, been spawned in with the car half buried in the ground and been unable to move, and more. A little more love and polish is required I feel.
Sound is much better, with the real cars all sampled and their distinct engine noises reproduced. Of course, when an engine is screaming at maximum revs while you are going sideways, they all start to sound much the same, but the effort has been appreciated. The music is also quite nice, in a background hum kind of way, and while there aren’t any voice overs, the story presentation works well. All in all, a mixed bag, but the game looks and sounds very nice, most of the time.
There’s some art to this…
The Art of the Drift
But what about the actual driving experience, what is that like? Well, in the past, the drifting games I’ve played have struggled with the actual mechanics of drifting, to be honest. In fact, the best drifting action has actually been in the various Forza games, and I think this is because their car physics models are so good that with some tweaking, drifting is pretty easy.
Well, the news here is very good, as the drifting in JDM: Japanese Drift Master is a lot of fun. There are two control methods, and I went for the simcade model, which apparently is the harder of the two.
As you buy your own car and start to tune it and upgrade it, the way that the car responds to your inputs is very good indeed. You have buttons for the handbrake, and also for the clutch, and kicking this is a good way to either initiate a drift or tighten the angle as you go around the corner. Countersteering, modulating the throttle, it feels really natural after only a short period, and this is a testament to the amount of care that has gone into the handling model.
A Race That Struggles to Stay Straight
Sadly, drifting is not the only way to drive in JDM: Japanese Drift Master, as there are also other ways to compete. Drag racing is okay, in a dull kind of way; I can’t get excited about a sport that drives in a straight line for about 10 seconds. But all the tropes are there: staging and warming the tyres, changing the gear at the optimal point to get the best time and so on, but compared to the drifting, it feels a bit flat.
The other type of racing is grip racing, and this is very poor. It doesn’t seem to matter what you do to the car, how you tweak it or try and drive differently, the cars always want to drift. Trying to get around a corner with the front wheels in line with the rear seems almost impossible, and the only way I could do it was to brake, get in the right gear, then coast round the corner, only accelerating when the wheel was straight again. Meanwhile your competition has no such worries and simply pile into the back of you, sending you into the barriers.
Trying to use the grip model on the roads is equally odd, as when you get a decent turn of speed up, the cars become really floaty, and any change in elevation will see you flying through the air. Grip racing really doesn’t work.
Other annoyances? Well, the loading times for the various races can be timed with a calendar, not a stop watch, and this really breaks up the whole flow of JDM: Japanese Drift Master. Restarting a race isn’t too bad, but fast travelling around the large map takes ages, and in some cases it almost feels quicker to drive to your destination. There are also viewpoints to be found, and to unlock them, you have to go into photo mode and snap a photo. So far, so good, but I only seem able to take a photo of the back of my car: the photo controls are really bad.
And amusingly, playing in the favoured front bumper cam view has issues; when I load into a race, my character is floating above the track, seated on thin air, which looks odd to say the least. Oh, and I’m going to keep complaining as only some of the cars are licensed: Subaru, Mazda, Nissan and Honda yes, but Mitsubishi and Toyota have generic names. This bugs me for some reason, especially when the first car you can buy is an AE86!
Needs some polish, but a decent drifter
The Best Drift Sim, But Nothing Else?
Going for a slide in the mountains is a whole lot of fun, whether that be for a mission or just to pass the time. The scenery looks amazing, and drifting feels so right that I can forgive a lot of the bad points found in JDM: Japanese Drift Master. It isn’t the most polished game ever, and does come with its quirks, but as a drifting game, it is currently right up at the top of the tree.
If you like JDM and drifting, then this is an easy recommendation. However, if you like a more rounded driving game, then this isn’t it. Now, I simply must go for a drift…
Important Links
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/jdm-japanese-drift-master/9P2D9T5WWTJ2/0010
AloJapan.com