It’s remarkable that one of the best games about the Japanese driving art of drifting comes from Poland. Gaming Factory has captured the feeling of drifting with JDM: Japanese Drift Master now on PS5 as well, although the narrative stands in its way a bit.
JDM: Japanese Drift Master is an odd game, at first glance. A racing game immersed in Japanese aesthetics, trimmed to realism, flaunting its allegedly authentic grasp of the philosophy of drifting, the car driving aesthetic art that emerged around Tokyo in the 1970s. And at the same time the developers not only come from Poland, but include their origins into the story of the game. This is, to get it out of the way, the weakest part of JDM, because the drifting is excellent. The narrative however, delivered in black and white manga chapters with stereotypically sketched characters, falls short. Not necessarily because of the obvious developer self-insert of the protagonist Thomasz, a Polish racer who moves to Japan to fulfil his dreams of becoming a drift champion. That’s on the nose, but fine. It’s much more that the story doesn’t move anywhere beyond that, that the delivery of the narrative in the form of the comic strips doesn’t convey any emotion, and that some characters like the conspicuously big-breasted love interest who adores everything the protagonist does becomes tedious very fast.
But does a racing game need story? Some genre peaks like Need for Speed: Most Wanted are certainly enhanced by it, but in the end, what it comes down to is racing. And JDM nails its vision here. Racing tracks is secondary in JDM, because its all about the more artistic expressions of drifting culture, namely drifting itself and variations of trick races such as drag. The drifting works in the form of points and multipliers, with the length of a drift combo defining the points and the style of the drift defining the multiplier. What JDM does great is using the game’s interfaces to give you control over the drifting: A bar at the bottom of the screen shows how much the car has to swerve to each side for good drifting or clean curve driving. Several ways to initiate and control the drift are included, such as handbrake and clutch, gear changing can be done manually or automatically. Generally, the difficulty settings are excellent, with even the easiest setting bringing you to learn some basics, so after a while you might be inclined to turn up the difficulty and teach yourself some more tricks. Drifting a track perfectly makes for a truly aesthetic experience, especially since the small open world of the game looks nice and fulfils quite a lot of the typical Japanese stereotypes one could wish for in a game landscape, from hanami flowers to mountain tracks and a route along a vast lake. Cars can be upgraded and visually customised with everything from Japan’s bōsōzoku rebel car subculture up to the deliberately ugly itasha (“ugly car”) anime decorations one would wish inside a tuning game. The development of a rusted but reliable squeaky car to a cleaned-up turbo performance racer feels very satisfying, and the visuals of the cars enhance that feeling greatly.
The one criticism the game’s races have to endure is that they do not actually give a lot of leeway for artistic expression, because not finishing the challenge of each race in first place makes for an automatic fail. Having drifted amazingly for 90 per cent of a track and then making one mistake and turning the car around can and will often cost players the full race, sometimes ten or more minutes long. A placement system like in the Forza: Horizon games with different rewards for the first three ranks would have helped to take some frustration out of this. At the same time, this restriction becomes quite clear to be a necessity in the narrative of the game; after all, the power fantasy of the protagonist relies on being the best.
JDM: Japanese Drift Master has been developed by Gaming Factory and published by Gaming Factory and 4Divinity. The PC version which we also reviewed released on 21 May 2025, the Xbox version on 21 November 2025, the PlayStation 5 version on 6 February 2026.
A great drifting game with lovely tuning system, only hindered somewhat by its narrative.
