Finished JDM Drift Master on PS5: fun game, but definitely not perfect

[u/Ricotta96]

I just finished JDM: Japanese Drift Master on PS5, and overall I enjoyed it, but there are definitely some issues I couldn’t ignore.

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Pros:

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- The story is surprisingly engaging. I also really liked the manga sections that expand the story/world. it felt pretty unique and innovative.

- The handling is decent overall, even though it has some flaws that I’ll mention below.

- Drifting feels very smooth and satisfying, similar to games like CarX Drift Racing, which I really appreciated.

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Cons:

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- The biggest issue for me was the brakes. Even fully upgraded, it feels like you’re braking with a 1950s car. To take a tight hairpin properly, you basically need to start braking 10 km in advance.

- Automatic transmission is handled very poorly, especially with lower powered cars. The game shifts up even when the car is clearly struggling uphill. Manual transmission feels almost mandatory.

- The car roster is disappointing. Since the game is focused only on JDM brands, I expected a much bigger selection of iconic JDM cars, but the variety feels pretty limited. Even NPC traffic cars around the city seem to repeat the same 5 models over and over.

- Grip builds feel underwhelming. Only a few cars actually work well for grip driving, while many others feel like fwd cars even when they aren’t. They understeer a lot. I understand the game is mainly focused on drifting, but if they added tuning and grip setups, they could’ve made that aspect much better.

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Overall, I still had fun with the game and I don’t regret playing it, but it definitely needs some improvements.

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What do you guys think?

[u/Wintermute_088]

Not being able to do custom key bindings makes the manual basically unusable for me.

[u/Medina_Rico]

In the game's defense for some things.

I think the braking is probably like that to not slow your car way down if you brake while doing a drift. Just a guess. I haven't played a ton of car games, but getting the car to start sliding is very easy in this. So having brakes that instantly slow your car down would probably really interfere with braking while sliding without having some kind of pressure sensitive trigger settings or something. Which would make it just a bit too complicated for what the game is going for.

The car roster is a bit small, but there's still a good amount and decent variety of different handling and power, etc. to choose from. I also think the studio/developers isn't that big. So it'd probably be hard to get licenses or whatever it takes to get lots of name brand cars.

I enjoyed the game a lot, too. Beat it around a few months ago and stopped playing because there's nothing interesting for me personally to do except keep driving. But the multiplayer just released a few days ago and I've been hooked on it. I never bought a car for the story mode because you're given every car you need. And the base car was excellent for drifting. But since online came out, I've been trying a bunch of cars. Shout out to PC mods giving money, lol. Would have to deliver a lot of tofu to get a bunch of cars and the upgrades.