Kirby Air Riders Review
Soaring Above the Competition
I’m kind of a massive Kirby fan, and I have been since I was but a young lad. I had plenty of time to plumb the depths of series history as a kid, looking for all the Kirby I could eat in what was my general introduction to retro games. 2003’s Kirby Air Ride naturally became the main reason I had a GameCube controller and memory card for my Wii growing up. Though I haven’t played that original game in a long time, I have fond memories of hours spent honing my cornering skills and checking off boxes to unlock everything that I could. Mario Kart has always been the standard bearer in kart racing, but I and other dedicated Kirby fans knew there was something special in that one-off spinoff. The driving was so simple, but the vehicles made it so varied. The racing was no slouch, but City Trial delivered a chaotic experience unlike anything else around. Alas, in the age before online multiplayer was commonplace, I had no one to play this game with.
Now, Masahiro Sakurai has returned to his original creation to direct a blockbuster sequel to the cult classic racer. As the years have passed, our standards for game design have changed. Live service has commercialized the online gaming landscape, with whole games orbiting around how many cosmetics they can jam into their monthly battlepasses. “Earning” has been replaced with “buying,” and the growth of e-sports has left most games focusing less on content and more on a repeatable, competitive experience. Sakurai has always been one to put the fun first - and to put his all into anything he works on. Kirby Air Riders is a game made the old-fashioned way, confidently eschewing the trends of modern multiplayer gaming to provide an ultimate smorgasbord of racing fun for players of all stripes.
The mantra of the Kirby series has always been “easy to learn, hard to master.” Air Riders is no different, featuring such effortlessly simple driving controls that anyone can pick up quickly. Acceleration is automatic, and you can press a button to slow down and charge up a boost to bring around the turn with you. Distinct from traditional drifting, there’s a lot of nuance in how and when to charge up that boost and just as much satisfaction in letting it loose at the perfect time for that ideal line through the track. Sliding off a ramp starts a glide, letting you soar over obstacles and get a little boost if you land smoothly. Flicking the stick lets you spin to attack nearby racers, making those neck-and-neck moments decisive. The standard mode, Air Ride, shows all these systems off in the racing style you expect.
The most satisfying addition in this game is the star slide, a speed boost gained by following another player’s trail that intuitively makes taking the lead back engaging. Press the boost button near an enemy to inhale them, spitting them out or copying their ability. Abilities either attack automatically or trigger when you hit boost, with the overlap having interesting implications on how you use them. Some abilities, like Fighter or Needle, specialize in hitting your opponents. Others, like Jet and the brand-new Flash, improve your boost and help you soar ahead.
The major difference from the previous game is in the variety of characters to choose from. Every player in Air Ride used Kirby unless you selected Dedede or Meta Knight, who were essentially vehicles as far as the game was concerned. Now you can combine a range of fun Kirby characters with all of the original vehicles from Air Ride and then some. Every character comes with different stats and their own special that charges up during the races, and most have some other perks as well. Though Sakurai lamented the need to add even one extra button to this impressively lean racing system, the specials give every character satisfying ways to power through and fight. Attacking provides the attacker a boost more than it slows players down, avoiding those awful Mario Kart situations where you get pelted by items helplessly. The only thing about the new characters which I don’t like is that it feels like good ol’ Kirby doesn’t have much to offer compared to their unique traits, especially since every character was given a way to use Kirby’s signature copy abilities.
Of course, the vehicles already provided the bulk of the variety, and that doesn’t change here. Your choice of vehicle can mean as little as statistical differences and as much as comprehensive changes to how the game controls. Some vehicles perform better while gliding, and others ride on wheels and can’t glide at all. The Swerve Star accelerates instantly, but can’t turn unless it comes to a full stop by charging a boost. The Transform Star can shift between a wheelie form and a star form, suiting the needs of the track. The Vampire Star has weak stats, but can attack other racers to power itself up and boost ahead. Vehicles can have such volatile strengths and weaknesses that the result of a race can feel decided ahead of time if the track and vehicles line up a certain way. Luckily, enough generic vehicles like the reliable Warp Star exist that you can round your riding experience out across courses. Just don’t be too disappointed if you end up on a course where one of your rivals’ vehicles is well-suited.
The sum of all these things is a racing experience with a lot of intensity and surprisingly high speed, but one which is nonetheless easy to jump into. The courses provide a lot of variety, both in how their layouts focus on different aspects of the game and in their vibrant settings. Each course feels grand, bringing racers along whole journeys even in their brief length. Cavernous Corners takes you from a jungle into a yawning cave entrance, leading through ancient ruins and a massive underground treasure hoard. Mount Amberfalls starts on a snowy peak, descending through the autumnal forests and waterfalls until the race ends on a beach. These areas are all so distinct that they’re appreciated even as you blast past rivals, snagging every opportunity you can to star slide and attack for a boost. It’s a chaotic kind of action-racer which feels just as unique as it did in 2003, even if it sometimes feels like you’re at the mercy of its craziness. Luckily, limiting the racers on the track to six keeps things a little more focused than they’d be otherwise.
Of course, real Air Ride fans know that it doesn’t stop at the standard racing. Two other modes exist. The second mode is Top Ride, a top-down racing experience built on the same fundamental controls as Air Ride. Courses are much shorter, emphasizing handling as you quickly bounce from hairpin to hairpin. Gliding exists, but it’s quite downplayed. Two control methods allow players to either point their stick in the direction they want to go or always steer left or right relative to the vehicle’s front; I find steer controls make a little more sense to me. This mode lacks specials and instead includes a whole host of items and copy abilities constantly dropping in, making races unpredictable. It ends up being a quicker, more casual mode. A lot of players didn’t expect Top Ride to return from the original game - Sakurai even joked about it being dispensable once - but it’s nice that even a small aside like this got the same kind of face lift as the rest of the game.
Of course, the breakout mode of Air Ride is what most fans are really here for: City Trial. This mode puts all of its players - up to sixteen in Air Riders from the previous four - into the sprawling city of Skyah, tasking them with running around the map for upgrades, new vehicles, and perhaps even the parts to construct one of four legendary air ride machines. Along with searching the map, you can attack your rival riders to steal their upgrades or even destroy their vehicles, forcing them to scramble for a new one while you reap the map’s rewards.
This all culminates in the stadium, where players get to choose between four possible events that lean into certain stats. Events can be as simple as a standard Air Ride race with your upgrades and vehicles, or as specialized as a gliding distance competition or an all-out arena brawl against other players. Without any knowledge of what stadium events will come, players either take a gamble on upgrading into a certain category or try to round themselves out to be decently prepared for whatever comes. You can also try to choose an event you don’t think your rivals will choose to have less competition.
With all of the craziness inherent to City Trial, including periodic map events that can be as catastrophic as falling meteors, it quickly becomes a mad dash for anything you can get your hands on. You can chase down your opponents to steal their legendary machine parts, putting one together for their awesome power. The map will suddenly spawn treasure chests as you quickly make for the key. Somebody will randomly find a crazy laser cannon that shoots a huge beam through the whole map and you might just have to deal with your vehicle exploding. This is easily the most “party game” part of the game. There’s strategy to be had, such as searching for the obscure corners of the map where special upgrades may spawn or gliding for distant, floating islands, but it ultimately feels like there’s so much randomness involved that your chances of winning are totally up in the air. That’s okay, though; games about having crazy, fun times like this are getting increasingly rare, especially in the AAA space. City Trial is nothing if not fun, especially now that I can fill up a game with players online whenever I want.
Every mode keeps you occupied with a huge checklist of unlocks. All kinds of objectives appear here, from simple ones you’ll unlock as you race normally to interesting challenges you can work towards completing. With only a few riders and vehicles by default, you’ll want to work through challenges quickly to try out everything. It’s refreshing these days to be able to get so much just by playing the game. Racing also earns you miles, a currency you can spend for cosmetics. You can put hats on your riders, customize your license card for players online to see, or buy parts for the My Machine customization mode. Using decals, attachments, and more, players can customize every vehicle in the game to their heart’s content. I haven’t managed much more than a simple palette swap myself, but I can guarantee that the machine editor is comprehensive. People have come up with a lot of creative stuff, and you can spend your miles to buy their work and use it yourself if you like it.
All of these aspects come together in the last, single-player focused mode, Road Trip. Telling the game’s story, Road Trip lets players collect upgrades and machines as they choose between a variety of challenges along several stages. The format evokes Classic Mode from the Super Smash Bros. series, being a canned sequence of matches across the game’s many modes. Though it’s fun to use Road Trip as a flight of everything the game has to offer, it does run a bit long for what it is. Running the same variety of stadium challenges and short races invariably gets repetitive, especially when you get enough upgrades that you can start blasting by races without much care for what your CPU opponents are even doing. Boss battles, though also a City Trial stadium option, end up being the coolest thing on offer. The final bosses - including the secret true final boss faced if you collect every machine - are epic, though I wish I didn’t have to play all of Road Trip twice for it.
Kirby Air Riders strikes me as the kind of game they just don’t make anymore. It’s fun, approachable, and engaging without being even remotely concerned with trying to be the next e-sport. The simple modes are supplanted by a huge checklist of things to earn, giving even solo players a ton to do. There’s also just a ridiculous amount of settings for everything from the game’s UI to private online lobbies with friends that help make the game as comfortable and playable as possible for everyone. Kirby has always been the one franchise that I feel successfully designs itself for everyone. Instead of trying to be the game that is all things to all people, it leans into its own identity and just removes as many barriers to that experience as it can. Air Riders is a prime example of this philosophy, with the veteran designer who created that formula at the director’s helm. The goal is to be fun, plain and simple, and Sakurai’s tireless dedication is no less impactful towards that goal than it is towards something major like Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. There’s no Switch 2 owner I can’t recommend Air Riders to, and it makes a strong case for the best racer on the system even in a year with strong competition.