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When Nintendo revealed Kirby Air Riders for the Nintendo Switch 2, many questioned why a racer would come so soon after what was seemingly Nintendo’s flagship, Mario Kart World. I was one of those people. At their core, both games are racers, but really, in the same way that Call of Duty and BioShock are both shooters. Kirby Air Riders is a fundamentally different racer to Mario Kart World and, though I didn’t care for Kirby Air Ride (or even Mario Kart World), Kirby Air Riders is far and away my favourite racing game on both the Switch and Switch 2 and well worth your time.
Surprisingly, the plot in Kirby Air Riders not only exists, but it’s also pretty intriguing. It’s by no means an enthralling piece of narrative drenched in character drama, but it is beyond anything you’d expect. Experienced through the game’s single player mode, called Road Trip, it tells an epic tale of cosmic warfare. There’s not a lot of crazy twists or turns, but it serves as a great backdrop for why all of these cute little characters are riding around on strange new machines. The production quality is similarly incredible, surpassing anything you’d expect, and feels like something we haven’t seen from Nintendo since The Subspace Emissary in Super Smash Bros. Brawl, all the way back in 2008.
But to understand how Road Trip works, you have to know how Kirby Air Riders works. There are four major modes available when you boot the game – Air Ride, Top Ride, City Trial and Road Trip. Mechanically, the game has not changed much from its first iteration on the Gamecube in 2003. You still use a single button to accelerate and activate abilities. It sounds bizarre at first – a racer in which you use a single button to do everything – but it surprisingly works. When you master Air Riders, it is somehow much more mechanically satisfying and is deceptively complex in its execution compared to other kart racers.
While a single button controls most of your actions in Kirby Air Riders, it somehow works. You automatically accelerate at a pace determined by your vehicle, holding down a button to slow down. Doing it for long enough brakes you completely, while releasing it at the right time will give you a short boost. The “meta” of Kirby Air Riders, then, is to work out the right time to lose speed to gain some. And once you get your head around the fact that this is really all you have to think about, it’s a bizarrely freeing feeling that allows you to focus on the things that matter – maintaining and building speed.
Once you’ve mastered the controls, either through tutorials or by winging it, you can jump into any mode at your leisure. Air Ride is your fairly typical selection of racing games – you can take part in a typical lap-based race, play a set time trial mode, or even infinitely loop each track in a kind of “free roam” mode. Each of the courses you’ll encounter in this mode is cleverly designed and well beyond what you’d expect, featuring some really gnarly loops and crazy trips through constantly shifting worlds. The power of the Switch 2 is being used here to offer up a racing experience that’s frenetic and hectic, much like recently released Sonic Racing: Crossworlds.
While I must commend the team for ensuring that nothing from the previous game was left behind, Top Ride is easily my least favourite mode, but it is still enjoyable. In Top Ride, players race around a course from a top-down perspective. It features its own unique set of tracks and uses the same mechanics as the rest of the game. It’s a nice inclusion and bound to be a better choice for those who find the traditional Air Rides overwhelming, but it’s too simplistic for me to keep coming back to.
City Trial is my favourite, offering up a bizarre PvPvE experience for up to sixteen players. You and the other players are thrust onto a City map, and must collect power-ups and vehicles to prepare yourself for a Stadium minigame at the end of each round. It’s easily where Air Riders gets the most intense, and it’s easily my highlight of the package. Playing it with a group of people in the same room is an enjoyable experience, which is only compounded when the game is constantly throwing batshit world events at you. Spawning a boss to defeat, raining explosives, or even just creating a short race for everyone to complete, it’s a cool experience that significantly evolves the formula seen in the original game.
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At the end of every City Trial is a Stadium minigame – some are simple races, while others are fun and quick objective-based minigames. There are over fifteen different Stadium minigames to play in City Trials, and you can even play them separately if you have some favourites. All in all, City Trial and the Stadium games attached to it are easily my personal highlight from the package, though I’d have loved if there were one or two more city maps available, just to keep things varied and fresh.
All of these modes, options and minigames come together rather elegantly in the Road Trip mode, which is the core solo experience in Kirby Air Riders. In this mode, you ride along many different roads, choosing your path through the story with a bunch of encounters built from the blocks that Kirby Air Riders is made of. Think of it as a combination of the encounters from the Spirit Battles and World of Light of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, with the narrative ambitions of The Subspace Emissary from Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Even better, there’s a tonne to unlock, and the story is infinitely replayable if you want to see the entirety of this bizarre story.
Of course, this is all bolstered by a strong roster full of a veritable who’s who of the Kirby universe. Each character can be paired with a unique machine, which, when paired with unique abilities, leads to some pretty interesting match-ups. It feels a lot more considered than other kart racers, where the only difference between characters is cosmetic, and vehicles are just stat differences. Instead, every vehicle and rider in Kirby Air Riders has skills unique to them. It’s a shame, though, that you have to unlock most of them, which can be frustrating if you want to play this straight away with your mates.
Though it’s worth noting just how robust the multiplayer options are for Kirby Air Riders. There is plenty of flexibility here in how you play it – every mode is playable with up to four players, besides Road Trip – and performance barely falters when you’re playing locally. For the most part, the multiplayer remains at 60 frames per second, although during some of the more intense events of City Trial, there is a slight slowdown, but nothing dramatic. Regardless, the bottom line is that Kirby Air Riders, whether played solo or with friends, doesn’t feel like a compromised experience when playing splitscreen.
However, this certainly raises the question of whether Kirby Air Riders is better played solo or with friends. On one hand, Road Trip mode is delightfully moreish, constructed from such an intense variety of activities served to you at such a brisk pace that you’ll struggle to put it down. But with friends, Kirby Air Riders really does shine too, especially in the same room. I can’t begin to tell you how much my friends and I found joy and laughed at the insane situations we found ourselves in, and that’s definitely worth mentioning.
In short, Kirby Air Riders is good for solo players, but even better in groups. But while its appeal is not as immediately obvious when compared to Mario Kart, its deceptively complex systems grounded in a simple control scheme easily make it stand out from the pack.
Though make no mistakes, while Kirby Air Riders is borrowing a lot of visual flourishes from director Masahiro Sakurai’s other baby, Super Smash Bros., Kirby Air Riders is easily Kirby looking at his absolute best. The sheer variety of colours and styles in the world design, coupled with some cute and vibrant animations, helps to bring this bizarre realm to life in a way that Kirby hasn’t before. It’s an incredibly nice-looking game, and this is only compounded by the game’s performance, which runs at a buttery smooth sixty frames per second almost always. Similarly, the soundtrack is also great, featuring epic orchestral themes that lend every race a sense of dramatic intensity that you don’t get in other racers.
When all is said and done, people will still probably compare Kirby Air Riders to Mario Kart World, and I wouldn’t blame them. I’ve no doubt drawn some comparisons here already. However, while its core fundamentals are similar, Kirby Air Riders is a truly unique and enjoyable experience that stands out from any racer I’ve played before. It’s an interesting little redux that finally makes good on the promises laid bare by Kirby Air Ride on the Gamecube, and a successful sequel in practically every way.
