JDM: Japanese Drift Master

Everything about this game is great

good af

[h1]A Japanese Fever Dreame Made In E.U.[/h1] [b]Relies heavily on Upscaling and Frame-Generation, poor Performance, too Demanding[/b] [h2]Forword[/h2] JDM: Japanese Drift Master lets you enter a drifter's dream representation of central Japan as a foreigner. You start from zero and gotta work your way up. Unfortunately, things don't always go smooth, both in the story and with the game's performance. More on the latter part in this review. [h2]Gameplay[/h2] [h3]Story[/h3] I don't want to spoil too much of the story, but it's pretty good for a racing game. Definitely in my top-ten of story racers. [h3]Handling & Physics[/h3] The handling model might take some time used to if you are used to contemporary simulators and simcade games. Offering two handling models is a nice idea, but ultimately useless, as the "Simcade" model awakens expectations it cannot fulfil, remaining an appendage with possibility of inflamation. As someone who prefers arcade racers, I can clearly see they drew inspiration in their arcade handling model from the classics and they did pretty good at that - but only for drift racing. Once you go into grip races or offroad it completely falls apart. For grip racing in particular, I gotta switch to the "Simcade" model to at least have something managable, even though it's a really boring model. But even in arcade mode, ABS and ESP gets in your way of drifting even in arcade mode, so you gotta turn that off if you want to drift and turn it on again if you just want to cruise. In general, a drift tune with ABS and ESP enabled is more fun to drive as a grip car than an actual grip tune. It's odd you have to go through the game settings for this, given how many other arcade racers dynamically adapt the handling model according to in-game player choices, and not since yesterday. The way it's done in JDM is managable, but is another dent in the fun ride. I recommend playing this game with arcade handling model with all assists disabled for drift events, as the simcade handling is neither fish nor meat and lacks direction but unfortunately a necessary evil to render grip races not completely frustrating. Alternatively, The "Simcade" setting is overall boring and I wish they would've put more time into making the arcade setting fun for grip and dirt racing instead of developing two handling models. Unfortunately, crash physics are a total joke and completely unpredictable. It would've been a better artistic choice to just leave the car planeted on the ground when crashing. [h3]Car Roster & Tuning[/h3] The game has a beautiful car roster with nice tuning options. A hodgepodge of licenced and parody cars, for the better and worse. But it proves that you don't need an uncountable number of vehicles to have great fun. The most recent DLC surrounding USDM cars is a welcome addition, however, the upcoming car DLC again focuses on USDM vehicles. Why not go for EUDM, BRDM, AUDM or even just a DLC that focuses on a car class indeginous to Japan but completely absent from the roster: Kei cars. European manufacturers market their cars to Japan, sometimes with special editions, and the player character is coming from Europe even. European cars are even mentioned in the story. There is a large Japanese diaspora in Brasil, a country with its own unique car culture, that could connect back to the game's setting. Utes are love, utes are life. And seeing kei cars, econoboxes, vans and sports esates in traffic all the time just leaves you wondering how much fun it would be racing these, even if they are FWD. They don't even have to be licenced, the devs figured how to make decent parody cars already. The base for it is definitely there. Now please just do something with it. [h3]Leveling & Scoring[/h3] You gotta get your reputation level up to unlock new stuff, but what's particularly noteworthy is that you also need to level up the driving proficiency level for each car to unlock things for that car in particular. This is a great design choice, as it actually makes you stick with a car for a good while instead of burning through the entire roster. To level up, there are many things to do, but most of it is done through racing and scoring drift points. The drift score system is good, but far from perfect. On one hand, sometimes crashes don't register; on the other hand, some advanced drifiting techniques like rallye-style 180-turns sometimes break the chain and reverse-entry drifts seem to always count as spin-outs. How is someone supposed to become a real Japanese drift master without being able to use these techniques to score points? Rough edges around the map don't help either. [h3]Map Design[/h3] The map design seems excellent superficially, and it's fun for the most part. Unfortunately the experience is soured by lack of visual communication throughout the map design. There are world objects that are destructable and then there are world objects that are indestructable but look almost identical. Yes, it isn't realistic to paint a destructable object a different colour just for the sake of it, but it is absolutely frustrating having your score wrecked by bumping into a railing that looks practically identical to one you just sideswiped one street before. If you don't aggressively colour-code objects, you need to either make everything in the right-of-way that is smaller than a car destructable, or nothing; everything else is unnecessarily frustating and ruins fun. As already mentioned, driving on dirt roads is attrocious and has no place in this game. In parts I blame the map design, as the implementation of these roads themselves is subpar at best. Like with so many unnessarily rough edges around the map. Some roads are blocked off, seeming to lead to distant but visible parts of the map, like the city centre. I hope the devs can tie up lose ends on the map in the future or let the community do so even. // read further in the comments...