JDM: Japanese Drift Master

I'm grateful it was a stepping stone in learning how to drift, but optimization issues are very noticeable in some areas and it significantly hindering drift control.

JAPANESE DRIFT MASTER - THE ELDEN RING BOSS OF DRIFT GAMES - ELDEN RING WITH A TRASH BUILD AND LOW HEALTH BAR! AND I'M playing at the lowest difficulty.... Not built for casual gamers but built for the gamer who specifically only play racing games since the age of 7. I'm just salty from skill issue. FAAAAAAAAA! -sound effect- Listen. I love racing games, correction, I love street culture, JDM, tuner, customize the eff out of my cars, racing games where I can take a stock manufactory built car and enhance it. You know. Make it powerful, make it beautiful, like I'm in Fast & Furious and ♥♥♥♥ or at a local car meet, and I like drifting in games too, so I really want to love this game. I really do. I want to purchase all the DLCS, all of that, If I was decent at it. It looks amazing, but the drifting in the game, mainly drifting to complete challenges make me want to rage quit quicker than I do playing an FPS game where you're loaded into a match AND the enemy team is already destroying your team in kills and objectives. Here is what I hate/dislike: [1] The game treats you as if you're suppose to be a drift G0d From the jump. The Drifting school feels like they put you on a Drift course in a drift car, tell you what score you need to achieve with a time limit, and is like, figure that ♥♥♥♥ out on your own homie. Dead Ass! And then it ramps up even more like, you've managed to pass that one, barely, now do it in the rain, and i need a way higher score this time. [2] The Delivery Ramen Challenge. Like your bread and butter for making currency to upgrade your car early, and it got the same stupid vibes going on. It's basically deliver this food, but don't damage it by hitting obstacles, but even though the customer won't see you driving, you need to deliver it while drifting and being cool, but you need to deliver it in time. And to praise the Devs a little bit, you did change and made it more forgiven than it was when the game first came out, But why IS THE EFFING GPS SHOWING ME A ROUTE ATLEAST 10x LONGER? so long that you can't even complete the challenge? I had to pull up the map and choose my own route. The destination was literally 30sec - 1min away, literally least than a mile, but the GPS route takes atleast 10 mins going down and going up snake-like curling roads. Reason? The GPS don't know how to calculate routes facing the opposite direction your car is facing.... [3] A Drift Learning Challenge. I want you to complete this course. There are like 8 Drift Zones, You need atleast 6 zones to complete it for the lowest rating, but lets make the drift zones literally as thin as a slice of bread. You must drift completely on the drift zone for it to count but your car must drift on the inside of the zone, and if your car even extends beyond the boundaries, it won't count. Also there is a time limit, so hurry up chump! FAAAAAAAAA!!!!! DO YOU THINK I'M A DRIFTER FROM HOONIGAN???????? I'm just a effing beginner!!!!! [4] Drifting Missions Against AI.....I'm already pissed that the A.I can rev and produce smoke behind the tires before it says "GO" and I can't, but my problem is the challenges itself. It goes like "Hey, I want you to drift behind or win the race against this guy/girl but you also need the higher drift score, also, your opponent will be able to drift perfectly like in bullet time mode, slow and smooth like butter, cruising like unrealistically that it feels like they are drifting in a different time zone", meanwhile I'm over here like I'm playing Tekken stressing. Also If you knock down one of the few movable obstacles like a light pole, and restart the mission, it will stay fallen on the road..... Also Time Limit! [5] Obstacles. The Roads on the map already consist of huge amount of narrow roads with sharp turns, and even though you can play without cars on the roads, who really want to play a car game without civilian cars? But the civilian cars make drifting even harder on an already hard game. Also the majority of obstacles in the game is unmovable. You hit a small stone, a road sign, it doesn't go flying, you do!!!!!!!!! And I can go on and go on! The game made me feel like drift focused games, is the one racing game type I should always avoid, even though I've enjoyed drifting moments in every other racing game. NFS, Midnight Club, The Crews, Forza, Test Drives, Tokyo Extreme Racer. etc. I even went and bought Torque Drift 2 to see if I would really hate all drifting games, and I like that one, so I guess it's really just this game I'm completely ass in..... Beautiful looking game though... to each, their own....

1-O jogo e bem mal otimizado, meu pc consegue rodar coisa mais pesada que isso a 60fps tem ate umas queda de fps aleatoria. 2-A fisica e muito estranha, de uma hora para a outra o carro vira um sabão e não para de sair de lado, em outro o carro não faz drift por nada, com freio de mão, na segunda marcha, e não vai por absolutamente nada, se eu bato SÓ uma vez em alguma parte ele desiste de fazer drift por completo. 3-Os bots são meio estranhos tambem, tipo, parece que ele segue uma linha só ignorando você completamente (exemplo: fico na frente do bot e do nada ele da um pit maneuver em mim) isso fica extremamente insurportavel, outra, o bot não acelera, são muito lentos o que faz eu bater neles toda hora. A unica forma que conseguir ter graça nesse jogo foi fazer touge, mais ainda assim ficou horroso para fazer touge por conta desse fisica toda estranha. Ok a ideia do manga e historia e ate legalzin, e meio entendiante mais da para ver.

здесь настолько узкие дороги, как моё очко перед тем как начал играть в соревновательные онлайн игры ♡

Please fix the game, game render not in full screen. Need to always change resolution and apply every time I start the game, it's frustrating! It detects my handheld as steam deck. I'm not using steam deck. Can't save any graphic settings, it always reverted back to steam deck settings. If it doesn't get fixed I'll refund. Sad that this game is fun, but it can't properly detect and save graphic settings. Annoying!

First of, lets talk about the bad parts: - The cars tend to feel to light, which makes crashes, oversteer and overall handling feel weird from time to time - The Ai can be hit or miss; sometimes they hit perfect drifts and they are fun to fight, sometimes they just run straight into a wall - The duel races where you follow the opponents are way to easy. When you hit one good drift close to the opponent, you basically aleady won the round, due to the multipliers. Also there is not a single duel, where you lead the race - The Hyundai Events feel weird. The car you drive is cool, but why do you fight a Ioniqu 5 and a Inster?! Makes no sense to me, to put a base model and one of Hyundais most boring cars into the game...could have easily been the Ioniqu 5N and the i30N or i20N. - Kinda unplayable with a wheel - There is some variety with Grip and Drag Races, but they a far and few between. - When driving at speeds over 250 Kph the 1st Person cockpit view starts to sway to much in my opinion. It would be nice to be able to adjust this with a toggle (0-100%) - The Story parts sometimes feel a little rushed and disconnected Now for the good: -While the Story was a little hard to follow from time to time, I still enjoyed the Manga art style, and also the Movie and Show references along the way. Some people criticise the quality of the Story, but tbh this is one of the best stories of any Racing Game in recent Years. - The driving feels intuitive and fun, I wouldnt call it simcade, but it is definetly impressive for a small studio to pull of driving phisics that feel fun (something the recent NFS games were lacking for example; IMO) - Car selection is great! I read some people criticising, that there are not enough JDM cars; that is absolute bullsh*t. You have all the big legendary Cars and on top of that you get some absolute stunners like the Kei Truck and the Kei Cars. I would love to see maybe the Daihatsu Midget, or the Mitsubishi FTO in the Future! - The game world looks great and is inspired by real places in Japan. It is honestly a lot of fun to drive around and try to find and recognise places. Also the street layout is fun and flows well. There are hills with tight corners for drifting, hills with some nice wide corners for Grip racing and some good long highway parts for high speed racing. In total, if you like Drifting (it is still very much focused on this!) and japanese Cars & Culture this is definetly for you. Just dont expect Forza Level Physics, or AC level handling. There are a few things I like to see added in the future, like some variety in the kind of races. Maybe some extended side stories for more of the main characters (in order to fill some minor plot holes). And most of all, I would love to see a Midnight CLub style Highway Race Part added, with full story and references. I believe the game could highly profit from pulling more from real life personas (as references of course, no direct integration for obvious reasons) and events. A more track focused Story line would also be nice, maybe with some additional tuning parts, so you can imitate the Super Silhouette and Super GT cars.

Beautiful graphics, buttery smooth game-play with lots of drifting. I’ve spent hours just cruising, enjoying the beautiful graphics & colours. So much drifting, and very satisfying when using gamepad with analogue triggers .Good Music and lots of tracks to listen through. This game performed very well on my laptop from day 1,a great experience so far, based on price and what you receive, with the attention to detail, the content, the passion that the developers have put in to this game, I think it’s a very good game. Reminds me a lot of The Crew, Test Drive Unlimited & Need For Speed, with free roam, photo mode, car customization. So far seems to be plenty of missions to complete and lots of cars to collect and customize, I’m happy with how much content there is. The map is huge and visually stunning! There’s no voice acting in this game, but you get instead a manga comic book style story. I think the choice of no voice acting actually makes this game stronger and helps it stand out when compared to other modern games, JDM has it’s own unique style. The Supporter Pack DLC has a light background story with some interesting characters , very cute girls and nice artwork, presented in manga style & downloadable 197 page PDF of the manga + an additional story -The Rise Of The Scorpion manga which is another 21 page PDF. The Car customization is deep: can tune engine parts, lots of engine upgrades available, you can adjust suspension height and wheel camber angles, you can paint your car any colours you want and add body kits, lots of different wheels available, and ability to change the interior trim -including the steering wheel & gear stick. And radio stations with lots of good music that fits game well. The game is very immersive & has a beautiful day to night cycle and the dynamic weather is good. Lots of different camera angles to choose, driver & cockpit views have good interior detail & realistic quality, especially when running the game on 2K resolution. What I love about this game : • Currently 41 cars available as of time of review with dlc included, and more on the way soon • Deep car customization – will keep you very busy • Beautiful graphics, bright colours, high detail to Cars & Japan scenery • Responsive controls & options to tweak control settings in the menu • Dynamic weather patterns: beautiful lighting, strong rain effects, occasional thunderstorms and a very good looking Day to Night cycle, • Excellent radio stations and music selection • Regular developer communications & updates, shows lots of love & passion went in to this game • A big beautiful free roaming world that reminds me of The Crew, Test Drive Unlimited and Need for Speed games & a good blend of simulation & arcade style car racing • High performance & visual presentation ,able to achieve high FPS with high graphics settings • Loading times are fast and good • You can change time of day by using fast travel. Depending how far away you are from the garage that you fast travel to, I’ve found it can progress time anywhere between 2 – 4 hours, which is a nice feature What I’d like to see improved on : • A larger map with more areas to explore. • I’d love to see some car jumps and big air in this game, I think jumps would fit in well with this style of arcade racing • More cars. it would be great to see more time period cars, eg 80’s & 90’s cars • More car realism, I’d love it if we could open the hood to see the engine open car doors & boots, unwind car windows. I’d like it if we could adjust the drivers seat position so it can be further away from the dashboard and also have a cinematic camera view like GTA, zoomed out more & automatically changes position • Better brake handling and brake sounds. Currently there’s little to no when using the handbrake, I feel this may be a glitch or something that was overlooked. Brakes need to be stronger & more responsive • Better photo mode , current photo mode kind of sucks, doesn’t capture the same colours you normally see during driving, you can manually adjust camera settings but it still doesn’t get the colours right .When you see an excellent view of a mountain in the distance ,all of the far distance colours & details will then disappear or are not captured when you enter Photo mode . • Better atmospheric sounds, I hear the engine when I engage the throttle, but as soon as I lift my finger off the trigger, I don’t hear any car engine sounds, it’s as if the engine audio just cuts out completely as soon as you stop holding down the button. It would also be nice to hear more of the other cars that you pass by, maybe have the ability to hear the music that other cars are playing as they drive past you to give more of a realistic immersive experience. • Improved realism with the world map, there’s currently no people anywhere in this game. You drive around and there’s literally no people anywhere, it looks incomplete & kind of creepy. • More driving missions and variations of missions, have more reasons to complete driving missions other than earning more money. Instead of only delivering sushi, it would also be cool if you could deliver car parts, pick up car parts from another garage or tow a car to a specific destination, which can then unlock cars & car parts that you normally can’t get. MY GAMING SET UP I’m playing this game on a Lenovo LOQ 15ARP9 Processor : AMD Ryzen 7 ,7435HS, 3100 Mhz, Graphics Card :8 GB NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 RAM: 24GB I’m using a 8BitDo Pro 3 gamepad controller & my laptop is plugged in to an old BENQ RL2755 27 inch 1080p monitor. GAME SETTINGS & PERFORMANCE: After spending some time ,I’ve been able to further improve the performance and appearance from experimenting with all the different graphic options available and found the best settings for me are the following : Internal Resolution: 1920 X 1080 : 90 – 110 FPS , CPU hovering around 50%- 60% at 68 degrees temperature & GPU running at 96% - 97% at 67 degrees temperature, RAM usage: 12.8 2880 X 1620 : 50 – 60 FPS , CPU hovering around 35% at 64 degrees temperature & GPU running at 99% at 68 degrees temperature, RAM usage : 12.8 ( my preferred setting so far.) VSync : Off Resolution Upscaling: DLSS Resolution Upscaling Preset : High Quality Frame generation: Off Sharpness: 0% (yes, turned all way down to 0%) HDR Setting :Off Mirrors Quality: Off Motion Blur : Off Ambient Occlusion: Low Anti Aliasing: Ultra Depth of focus quality : Ultra Detail Quality: Ultra Effects: Ultra Environment Quality: Low Post Processing Quality: Ultra Shadow Quality: Low Texture Quality: Low Sight Distance Quality: Ultra Global Illumination : Low Reflection Quality: Ultra

[h1] a lot of content, but a very rough experience [/h1] [h2] pros [/h2] [*] licensed cars [*] reasonable number of main story and side missions to gain resources and driving experience for the drifting mechanic [*] progression is quite hassle-free, with loads of currency given for upgrading vehicles after completing a story mission [*] reasonable price for an arcade racer, when on 45% discount or more [h2] cons [/h2] [*] JDM seems to want the player to play a certain way, and the developer also nudges players to try to behave in a certain way to make progress within the game. Looking at it from a different perspective, the game seems to force players to lock in to a very specific method of playing - get decently good at the mechanics, upgrade a car as much as possible, win races, buy a better (or even the best) car and fully upgrade that as well, win more races. This leaves very little room for picking anything other than the most min-maxed cars for your playthrough [*] The drifting will be very hit or miss for many players - the drifting mechanic seems to resemble the very aggressive powersliding style of drift from the Need for Speed Underground / Most Wanted (2005) titles, which does take some getting used to. What makes the drifting somewhat frustrating is that the accelerator plays a large part in controlling your car's drift - the setting for adjusting the accelerator to your likings (accelerator sensitivity) is within a hidden menu that is never addressed in the tutorial, and most players who don't find this setting might have a frustrating time trying to learn drifting on a controller [*] Race events don't have previews of their requirements. Some races have multiple alternative win conditions, but it really shows some of the weaknesses in the design - you can either pass the finish line first, or win the most points from your drifting; however, you still need to pass the finish line under a certain amount of time anyway. Other races are actually getaway missions where you need to have a fast or well-tuned drift car to escape enemies - sometimes, you are given missions where you can't even drive your own vehicle, and have to finish in a pre-made vehicle that is much worse than the one you drove to the event [*] The manga is a great effort, but is really difficult to read without screen magnification from the big picture mode - perhaps I missed the magnification option, but manga panels don't work so well on displays that you can't zoom into easily. [*] UE5 optimisation leaves much to be desired - the game would crash regularly while driving at high speeds, sometimes with stuttering as you loaded into a new area while speeding around on inter-city highways; in one instance I had most settings on lowest setting, and the game crashed while I was toggling between upscaling options. Loading iinto the garage and the overworld also take a significant amount of time (more than 10s), which makes switching feel like a time penalty in a fast paced game [*] AI is often unequipped for flashy maneuvers like tandem drifting, so you won't be able to re-create wallpaper-worthy drift battles that easily [*] Photo mode works in an odd way - any screenshots are duplicated, with one version in the steam screenshots having the photo mode UI and the UI-less version being buried in the game files. Devs have been meaning to fix it, but the bug seems to be at least 6 months old. [*] Story ends rather abruptly and in an odd way, with [spoiler] a fourth wall break from the developers [/spoiler]. I'm still not sure if this was intentional, or a result of budget constraints [*] in-game GPS is just as frustrating as a real GPS, but for no good reason. This has a negative impact on the game when playing certain modes (e.g. Sushi delivery - some missions seem to randomly spawn delivery points, and appear to go away if you fail/complete the mission with no way to re-attempt them) [*] The same handful of maps are used for grip racing, which is disappointing given the large overworld map and the street racing subculture themes of the game [h2] conclusion [/h2] [*] not a bad game, but not something I can easily recommend to casual players of racing games [*] despite the arcade racer meets racing simulator design, the game borrows a bit too many genre-defining ideas from either side that don't gel well together [*] potentially recommended if you want something that looks pretty and don't mind the crashes (they aren't that bad as progression seems to be saved very consistently on the April 2026 version, despite past reports of bugged stat tracking)