Kirby Air Riders Review – Shooting Star
I know what you’re thinking – or at least, what I was thinking when I put my hand up for this review – “Ah Kirby, that should be nice and relaxing, perfect for my 5-year-old now he’s wrapped Forgotten Land too.” I was of course horribly wrong about the relaxing part, plus there’s almost zero gameplay overlap between Forgotten Land and Kirby Air Riders, but in this case being wrong was such a pleasant surprise.
Kirby Air Riders is a sequel to Kirby Air Ride, a 2003 GameCube title directed by Kirby creator Masahiro Sakurai and his last at HAL Laboratory. Responsible for Kid Icarus: Uprising as well as a little series called Smash Bros (also something I’ve not really played, sorry NintenBros – OG on the 64 was my little brother’s game, I was being a rad dude with Majora’s Mask) it’s safe to say, there is a certain amount of hype based on Sakurai’s involvement alone and if Air Riders is anything to judge it by, I might also have been wrong to let the Smash Bros franchise pass me by. Kirby Air Riders inevitably draws parallels to Mario Kart World given they’re both Nintendo mascot vehicle-based games exclusive to the Switch 2, but let me put it bluntly; Mario & co. are eating Kirby’s dust. Air Riders moves at breakneck speed, the kind of hyperactive fever dream that reimagines what a kart racer could be across a range of modes and an addictive challenge system that keeps a steady dopamine drip-feed of new content unlocking. Anyone expecting Kirby Kart is going to be a little disappointed, not because of what Air Riders is necessarily but perhaps what it isn’t. There’s no Cups to be won here, no CC modes to work through, just a puffy pink blur spinning a star into your face and mashing you against a wall at 100 MPH.
I cannot stress enough, that no matter how much of a Bad Dude you might be, the first place to visit in Air Riders is the Lessons section. I’m not joking – my first attempt at a race in Air Ride mode ended miserably and made me feel every moment of my 39 years of age. Between the bright colours, flashing lights, obnoxious sound effects and a warning message that I didn’t need to do anything to accelerate, I felt out of my depth humbly taking my 6th place trophy and trudging back to school. Air Riders doesn’t have a difficult control scheme per se, but it feels unintuitive to the inexperienced, a fancy way of saying that it’ll feel good when you git gud.
Air Riders offers four main modes of play between Air Ride, Top Ride, City Trial and Road Trip. Road Trip is the single player RPG-lite campaign that is way less prominent in the menu than it should be for the amount of gameplay it contains. Players choose a character from the Kirby-verse and make their way through a science fiction storyline broken up by a ridiculous number of activities drawn from every other mode. These range from standard races to inhaling as much food as possible or engaging in all-out vehicular carnage. This Air Riders buffet is also eminently replayable due to branching paths and player-led event selection that offers three options for players to drive into and select; it would be very difficult to have any two Road Trips end up following the same route. After taking some Lessons and a Road Trip, the true goal of Air Riders becomes clear; push players to master the game by showering them in cosmetic and gameplay expanding goodies. There are hundreds of small goals in the game linked to each mode; think ‘Complete Three Laps without Hitting the Walls’ or ‘Use the same Copy Ability twice in a Race’. During the first few hours of Air Riders, these will be popping left and right without even trying, but oh-so-slowly the drip feed dries up and things start to ger serious. The harder goals require precision and specificity in character, vehicle and course selection, not to mention playstyle, as there are more than a few which will have to be the sole focus of a race, podium results be damned. This incentivises play but can also reveal to players just how goal oriented they are…or aren’t, which can be frustrating when a course or beloved character is locked behind something especially challenging. Goals don’t overlap across modes either, so unlocking more courses in Air Ride won’t have much of an impact on Top Ride or City Trial.
Air Ride is the most prominent option from the main menu and as such is the most traditional, offering straight races across multiple laps. Starting out with only a handful of newer fully 3D courses, this eventually opens up to ‘Nostalgia’ courses taken from the original Kirby Air Ride which, despite a visual overhaul, feel tight and claustrophobic in scope when compared to the expansive new designs. It’s a genuinely exciting moment to unlock a new course, each uniquely themed and better suited to certain vehicles and playstyles when going for time records. The ability to glide in Air Riders opens up a level of verticality not often seen in similar titles and those willing to experiment with how they play the game will reap the rewards; I dream of soaring, but most of the time I’m happy to stay fairly grounded in my preferred vehicle types. How balanced each approach might be when in competition is hard to tell, but given Sakurai’s pedigree I expect there to be a very high skill ceiling to Air Riders and if not a hugely popular competitive scene, at least one that is exciting to watch.
Top Ride flips the script by putting players at a Birds Eye View of the action. Top down courses give a Micro Machines vibe in both aesthetics and the ‘shrunken down’ gameplay from such a distance, with a control scheme reminiscent of Resident Evil tank controls. Bite sized, most runs will be done in under 90 seconds. Out of every mode in Air Riders, it’s Top Ride that feels the most slavishly devoted to nostalgia and were it not in the original, it might not be here either. I can’t entirely say I’d be happy with it being cut though, as the Top Ride levels provide a good break from the sensory overload of Air Ride and City Trial.
City Trial is bonkers, a mode that feels like it frontloads the good stuff to finish with a whimper, at least to my taste. Kirby and co. start by zipping around a large-ish open world area, grabbing stat upgrades and swapping vehicles for between 3 and 7 minutes occasionally interrupted by an Event with a capital E – think giant Gordo’s falling from the sky or a mysterious Pillar that needs to be destroyed – before competing in a rather short mini game, the sort of thing I’d expect to see in Mario Party. With a default time of 5 minutes spent in the ‘City’ portion of this mode, the pacing felt all wrong and was vastly improved for me by adjusting the time based on what portion of City Trial I wanted to focus on. The Stadium mini games themselves are fun little challenges drawing on a single skill or action, like seeing how far or high you can get your vehicle, but it’s hard not to see them as a little anti-climactic and somewhat dependant on the vehicles and characters unlocked up to that point. To be fair, they did feel better to me when marathoned on their own absent the City Trial section, but that might say more about my attention span than the quality of Air Riders.
Air Riders benefits as much as any Nintendo game does from their strong use of art stylisation to get around hardware deficits. That said, the Switch 2 really holds its own to keep the blistering speed and sheer sensory saturation running at a solid framerate across handheld and docked modes. Loading times however are a touch longer than I’d like and can hopefully be addressed in a future update, especially noticeable when playing shorter challenges or Top Ride races. I would be honestly shocked if there isn’t more content in the pipeline as well, at least in regards to more Air Ride courses. If Mario Kart 8 has taught Nintendo anything, it should be that a steady drip of new areas to explore is worth its weight in gold and can carry a title across multiple hardeware generations. The same can be said of every mode, each of which can also be played online for those wanting to see just how high the skill ceiling is in Air Riders. As for myself, I’m more than happy to keep improving my lap times, exploring new routes in Road Trip and slowly ticking off challenges while I do. Where I dropped off Mario Kart World incredibly quickly, Kirby Air Riders has kept me coming back – what can I say? It’s really sucked me in.
Kirby Air Riders was reviewed on Nintendo Switch 2 using code kindly supplied by Nintendo Australia.
