Kirby Air Riders Review

I love Kirby games. That delightful pink orb brings me a joy that is hard to quantify – but I will gladly spend the rest of my days attempting to do so. I have dipped a toe in almost every Kirby adventure I could get my hands on (I will find Kirby and the Rainbow Curse one day) apart from one very specific, oddball cousin of a title.

Kirby Air Ride, however, hit a perfect trifecta of reasons for why I never engaged with it. First off, I never had direct access to a Nintendo GameCube – it just wasn’t a prevalent system on the tiny island I called home. Next, I did not have a great deal of interest in playing a racing game with a name that didn’t start with ‘Mario’ and end with ‘Kart’. Finally – and I feel like a real tool writing this – I was 17 at the time, and was immersed in a very different scene. That scene was underage drinking and girls. What a cool guy I was.

In retrospect, however, I probably would have had a better time with Kirby Air Ride.

Top Ride is a more pocket-sized Air Ride experience

Kirby Air Riders is one of the early would-be killer apps for the NINTENDY: SWITCH DOS, being a big-name major release in the first year of the console’s life – surprising many, but delighting a dedicated few. It was either brave or stupid of me to skip the multitude of Nintendo Directs dedicated to the game, but I felt I was armed with enough information to decipher the vision of Masahiro Sakurai bringing the format back to life. This was Kirby, only not. And it was a racing game, only, well, not. With a striking set of visuals and a pumping soundtrack, I felt I was in for a fairly run of the mill racing affair with a dash of Kirby-themed biffo.

A robust onboarding experience promptly trounced my expectations. Accepting that there was a strange fascination with this game using the face buttons, step one was to essentially discard all of my kart-racing knowledge and learn to accept that my auto-driving vehicle will be taking the lead – my job is to take care of the rest of the busy work. That is, pausing to boost in a direction, angling my vehicle to glide and land safely, and most importantly, leveraging a variety of attack options to crush my opponents. The tutorial was very emphatic about this particular facet of air riding: This is a bloodsport, not a Sunday drive.

Aurora Borealis? At this time of year?

Simply put, the vast majority of your energy will be spent steering your careening contraption, with the rest of your mental bandwidth dedicated to a flow chart of blisteringly fast environmental options and choices. The sense of pace is astounding, but speed is just a small part of the richer Air Riding canvas – where you will be looking ahead to power up options, anticipating tight turns that could benefit from a right corner boost, jumps to glide to a positional advantage or avoid other enemy attacks – and a meter that’ll dictate when you can unleash a devastating ultimate attack. It can feel immediately overwhelming.

You’ll also need to pick a rider, and the machine they will be perched upon. Both rider and machine have unique stats, with the mechanical mounts taking into account everything from gliding capability to heavy duty offensive power, reflected in their physical appearance ranging between graceful space ships to something Axel from Twisted Metal would gladly take for a spin. It’s deliciously nutty when placed alongside the colourful cast of Kirby games-past.

Of course, it isn’t a Kirby game without Copy Abilities, and even at breakneck speeds you’ll be expected to slurp up a baddie and leverage their power against others. The amount present in the game reflects the greatest hits of Kirby history, with all your favourites available and implemented to turn the tide of a high-speed showdown. Ever wanted to throw a barrage of kung fu punches while going at 120km/h? This is the place to make it happen.

Kirby dodging lasers like he was in Mission: Impossible 64

Once you ascend the lofty learning experience and accept that you don’t really have any rigid transferable skills to apply here, you can start to appreciate and learn the quirky nature of it all. For all that is going on, your actual inputs are incredibly straight forward. Accelerating automatically means you don’t need to worry about that old chestnut, leaving you to master the oddly implemented brake-and-boost functionality. Holding your B-button will actually start to charge a boost meter – while also braking harshly, so reaching the peak boost opportunity is a gamble. Doing this on a straight bit of road is essentially pointless, but if you are at a high enough pace to screech to a halt on a tight corner and rocket off at a new angle, you’ll be rewarded deeply.

This method of rapid redirection then ties into the other core tenet of the game: Battling. Not all throwdowns are done on a track, and in these open areas the ability to quickly shift your heading can lead to better power ups, dodging and even offensive manoeuvres. Hitting someone at speed, especially while doing a wild spin (achieved with a stick wiggle) will damage them nicely, but crashing towards them with a fireball or wildly swinging sword will devastate them. Heck, there was more than one racing occasion where I actually used this brake-and-boost oddity to trade off a healthy lead to U-turn myself into a missed power-up, before returning to the correct track direction – now packing a little insurance for those that were gaining on me. It’s unlike anything I have EVER done in a racing game, and completely unthinkable in something like Mario Kart.

It’s a quirky ruleset that begs to be mastered, turning even the most pedestrian racing experience into a tight and tense showdown. I often play Nintendo review games in my household living area, and was surprised at how often my family would be entranced by what was going on – my racer slamming into boxes to crack them open, then turning on a dime to blast into an oncoming threat. It’s wild, weird and altogether very addictive.

The deep lore behind Air Riding is something well worth experiencing

The game gives you a variety of gameplay offerings to make use of your new adopted skillset, each maintaining the key identity of Air Riding but remixing the application to keep it engaging. It is important to clarify that these are not minigames, but full-fledged modes in their own right – qualifying for equal real estate on the games main screen. The first of which is imaginatively titled Air Ride, permitting you to pick rider and machine and embark on a quick jaunt. Up to four players are supported, so feel free to ruin friendships however you wish.

A slightly different kettle of fish is the City Trial,an almost-deathmatch style experience where you zip around an open map named Skyah City, with seven entire minutes to scramble and loot upgrades like you were in a Battle Royale. All the while, other racers (and their machines) will be bearing down on you, each with their own unique statline, so gird your loins for heavy hitters if you are on a more fragile mount. When the timer ends, a minigame will start, and you cross your Kirby fingers that you managed to get some decent upgrades to manage it. These can range from an elimination scramble against your peers, to a mad dash to press environmental buttons for points. It’s nuts, frustrating, and yet oddly compelling to try just one more time and see if you can do better next go around. With friends? Utter chaos, and clearly the intended way to play.

The other race mode struck me as weird, given that Top Ride seemed to simply be a top-down camera race on smaller circuits. It was the one mode that came across as low effort – like a questionable minigame thrown in for a laugh. It wasn’t until I booted up Air Riders in handheld mode and blitzed through a few of the tracks that I realised that it almost felt like a lower-stakes option for when you want to play the game without a heap of added stress. I settled on realising it was a well realised remix of the base game, rather than a doofy throw-in.

Road Trip: Pick your path, pick your poison

The real gem here – at least, in my opinion – is the Road Trip game experience. In Road Trip, your chosen rider will tootle along a road on their machine, encountering other riders that represent different bite-sized gameplay experiences. You choose who you collide with, opting into whatever mode they are offering and completing it to gain power ups that make your machine stronger. These play offerings go well beyond the standard race or knockout exhibition, with dozens of microgames that all fit alongside the established weirdness, whether you’re racing to a key that can unlock a chest, or trying to glide your cart into a dartboard for a huge score.

At the end of each road section, a boss will become available – they too will inhabit different game modes – and defeating them will let you progress to another road, with a new set of scenery to behold. You’ll also encounter mobile shops and rest stops on your expedition, offering consumable buffs and lasting upgrades to turn you into a harbinger of doom. Even as a novice I figured that dumping everything I could into the Attack stat couldn’t hurt, and was soon delighted to spin cleanly through three mugs in my next race.

The icing on this ridiculous cake is the over the top narrative that plays alongside Road Trip. Completing each leg of your journey will reward you with a gorgeous pre-rendered cutscene that dives into the deep lore surrounding how Air Riding came to exist on Planet Popstar – telling a cosmic tale that spans the Kirby universe. Road Trip is a brilliant mode to play on its own merit, but the delivery of these capstone cutscenes had me locked in my seat. It’s a story that is every bit as peculiar as you might expect within the confines of Air Riders itself, and I can’t recommend it enough.

Gummies might be the best modern addition to gaming since ray-tracing

There is also a ton of fun objective chasing within the game, with a fully realised pseudo-achievement system in the way of Checklists. Every mode within the game has an immense list of stuff you can do to challenge yourself, with each unlocking something neat and contributing a tile to a huge mosaic mural reminiscent of the 3DS Puzzle Swap app. It’s exhilarating to complete a spectacular race effort, and see a long list of cool things you managed to do, and rewards for having done so. These rewards can range from mundane things, like stickers or profile backgrounds, to new riders to enjoy and customisation pieces for your machines – a system that is refreshingly robust considering the absence of any such thing in a game like Mario Kart World. There is also an in-game currency that rains coins upon you, allowing you the opportunity to shop in the in-game store for further machine nifties, or to buy a viking helmet for your rider.

Special mention to what I now consider to be a staple feature in games moving forward: Gummies. Besides your Checklists, besides your unlocked decals and paintjobs, some of your in-game accolades will give you a gummy. The gummies are deposited in a specific area you can access from a menu, where they amass like gold in Scrooge McDuck’s money bin. And, much like Scrooge McDuck, you can then futz about with them – diving your little cursor person into them, scattering them about – OR – summoning a massive sword to slap them all over the place. It is functionally pointless, but serves as a soft and gooey trophy case that invites you to be as chaotic as you please. Zero notes.

My initial thought was that this all felt far too niche for a Nintendo-lead title. I love the Italian plumber and the escapades of his nearest and dearest friends, but you can’t avoid the permeated truth that they are all very ‘safe’ experiences. The most polarising thing you’ll find in any of them is perhaps the choice of protagonist, or even genre – you’d struggle to find specific elements that hit you in the face with such a braggadocious case of love it or leave it. But this attitude seems to pervade all of Kirby Air Riders. It’s weird, not for everyone…and I think I adore it for that very reason.

Final Thoughts

Cresting that initial feeling of odd unintuitiveness can feel like a battle, but the breakthrough reward for sticking it out is a fiendishly fun, unique race-battle experience. It should come as no surprise that my only real example is how approaching Smash Bros. for the first time can feel frustrating and weird – speaking volumes to the vision of Sakurai as an individual that can turn even the most preconceived expectations on their head to great effect. If you get a chance to take the pink puffball out for a spin, gird your loins and see it through. You may just find yourself deeply surprised.

Reviewed on Switch 2 // Review code supplied by publisher

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