Kirby Air Ride Review: Soaring or Stalling?

Kirby Air Riders stands as a wonderfully strange and ambitious revival, delivering an enormous leap forward from its GameCube predecessor. This single-button racing sequel bursts with content, offering deep customization, meaningful unlockables, and a staggering attention to detail that makes it hard to imagine a better version of this specific concept. However, the core racing formula, built around minimalist controls, can’t quite match the universal appeal of giants like Mario Kart. The simplified control scheme sometimes feels restrictive, creating moments where the game crashes into its own design limitations. Embracing its unconventional handling and wild physics is key to unlocking a fun, frantic experience packed with nearly endless activities.

Players can choose from more than 20 distinct machines and a similar roster of riders, each with unique stats and a powerful special move reminiscent of a Final Smash. The character selection pulls from every era of Kirby’s history. My personal favorite is the hilarious Chef Kawasaki, who attacks rivals by serving them damaging spicy curry. Initially, only a handful of options are available, but new riders and vehicles unlock steadily just by playing any game mode.

Machines handle automatically, creating a constant sensation of forward momentum. Your role involves steering, launching off ramps to glide, executing drift-boosts on sharp turns, and attacking opponents. All of this is managed primarily with the left stick and a single button that handles braking and boost charging. While a second button was added for special attacks, the control scheme remains minimalist. The floaty, sometimes unwieldy handling takes practice. Skidding around corners feels unnatural initially, and specific vehicles introduce additional quirks, like the Swerve Star which can only turn while braking.

The strikingly original mechanics are a major part of the charm. Nothing else plays quite like the Air Ride games, and mastering each machine’s peculiarities is incredibly rewarding. While some vehicles feel overpowered, the high-speed Chariots that corner effortlessly will likely dominate online play, most remain viable in their own way. The Jet Star, for instance, is sluggish on the ground but gains massive speed bursts during flight, encouraging players to memorize the best ramps on each track. This experience is nothing like Mario Kart, but conversely, Mario Kart is far more accessible for newcomers. Air Riders provides detailed tutorials, yet introducing it to friends requires a similar level of instruction as teaching a complex board game, unless they’re content to simply bounce off the course barriers.

I adapted to the controls quickly, aided by muscle memory from the original game. The sequel brilliantly expands upon the first game’s promise, a transformation most evident in the Air Ride mode. This traditional racing format features intense six-player competitions on a fantastic lineup of 18 courses, nine brand new and nine returning favorites. A common critique of the original was that races could feel automated, with minimal driver input. While it’s still possible for your machine to stumble to the finish line on its own, Air Riders introduces many more strategic considerations that significantly raise the skill ceiling.

Following the star trails left by opponents ahead increases your top speed, creating a compelling risk-reward dynamic. Defeating enemies by inhaling them, using copy abilities, or spinning your machine is crucial, as each takedown grants a speed boost and charges your special meter. Smaller details matter too, like landing perfectly after a jump to gain a momentary speed burst. Many mechanics existed in the first title but have been enhanced here. Combined with a higher overall speed, the racing demands intense focus, requiring players to track the fast-paced action and rhythmically time their attacks and boosts.

The incredible track design elevates the entire experience. Each new course feels like a rollercoaster, packed with stunning visual effects, high-energy music, and numerous branching paths that cater to different machine strengths. My personal favorite is Mount Amberfalls, a breathtaking downhill sprint through an autumnal forest filled with sharp switchbacks. The returning courses are simpler by comparison, but their inclusion is a welcome treat for series veterans.

Another mode, Top Ride, shifts the perspective to a top-down view for bite-sized races on miniature tracks. This simpler offering wears thin quickly and feels included mostly out of obligation to the original game. While it’s more developed than before, allowing you to use any machine, it ultimately plays like a diluted, zoomed-out version of the main races. It’s not terrible, and fans of the original mode will likely enjoy it more here, but it remains the package’s weakest component, serving best as a brief diversion from the more engaging options.

The fan-favorite City Trial mode returns, allowing up to 16 riders to scavenge an open city map for five minutes, building the most powerful machine possible before competing in a final minigame. If you played Smash Run in Super Smash Bros. for 3DS, you’re already familiar with this concept, which was heavily inspired by the original Air Ride’s City Trial.

Even after two decades, City Trial remains the absolute highlight of the package. Roaming the new Skyah map, hunting for stat boosts and better vehicles, attacking rivals, and reacting to random events is an absolute blast. It’s dangerously easy to talk yourself into “just one more round” with friends.

The mode stays fresh with dozens of potential field events. You might face surprise boss fights against classic Kirby foes like Kracko, deal with energy tanks providing a temporary speed surge, or navigate the city blanketed in thick fog. Skyah’s geography also features slight variations: the forest area cycles through seasons, warp gates appear in different locations, and, if you’re fortunate, distant islands covered in power-ups will materialize, offering a huge advantage to anyone with a glider capable of reaching them. Learning the city’s layout is deeply rewarding, allowing you to develop favorite strategies, like diving into the volcano to collect all the treasures inside or hunting for three rare parts to assemble an overpowered legendary machine, a rare event that feels special every time.

That said, City Trial’s chaos can sometimes become overwhelming. Gathering too many power-ups can make your machine feel completely uncontrollable. While you might think the solution is to be selective about which items you collect, the game’s inherent slippery handling and constant acceleration make precise item management unrealistic beyond a certain point. Consequently, the machine you end up with often feels more like a product of random chance than a deliberate creation. This doesn’t ruin the fun, but it means City Trial is best approached as a frantic party mode rather than a highly competitive, skill-based experience. Strategic decisions still matter, such as choosing to attack a boss directly or targeting other riders to steal their stat boosts, but the primary focus is on chaotic fun.

This philosophy extends to the Stadium minigames that conclude each City Trial. The selection process for the final challenge is unusual. In online play with 16 riders, everyone is presented with four minigame choices tailored to their machine’s stats. If your vehicle has a high top speed, you might pick Drag Race. If it’s built for combat, Kirby Melee or Dustup Derby would be ideal. I’ve always loved the Winged Star machine, so I typically find myself in glider-based challenges like Target Flight.

It’s helpful to have a choice online, preventing you from being stuck in an event you can’t possibly win. However, this system often splits your group into different Stadiums, meaning you might compete for five minutes only to face CPUs or strangers in the finale. Local play has the opposite issue; everyone votes on four options, and a roulette makes the final selection, which can sometimes land your group in a Stadium where someone has no chance.

A workaround exists by selecting the Random option before the match and then disabling all but one event in the settings. You’ll also see occasional hints about which Stadium might be selected. For a game so customizable in other areas, it’s a shame there isn’t a more straightforward way to announce the final Stadium at the start, allowing everyone to build their machine with a specific goal in mind. This feels like an area where the developers adhered a bit too strictly to the original blueprint.

Despite this, City Trial is an incredible amount of fun in a group. Destroying a friend’s machine and watching them scramble on foot to find a new ride before the timer expires is a timeless joy. It’s a perfect hangout game. Technically, Air Riders performs admirably amidst the chaos, maintaining a solid 60 frames per second in single-player and holding that performance remarkably well with four players on screen, with only rare hiccups.

The online suite is impressively robust, featuring 32-player lobbies, both casual and ranked matchmaking, and a functional friend invite system, features not always guaranteed in Nintendo titles. Online play was smooth during pre-launch testing, and it’s a mode I plan to revisit often.

For solo players, Air Riders offers a staggering amount of content. There are 750 achievements spread across checklists for each mode, and completing them unlocks meaningful rewards like new characters, machines, tracks, music, color variants, hats, and other cosmetics. You constantly stumble upon achievements you never knew existed, adding satisfying side objectives to every race. These goals cleverly recontextualize all the game’s content, adding immense replayability. Even after 25 hours, I still have over a hundred left to complete. A brilliant feature allows you to attempt any achievement directly from the checklist, automatically setting up the required conditions with a single button press.

Every activity earns in-game currency, which can be spent on paint jobs, stickers, and accessories to fully customize your machines. The depth here is surprising. I loved creating personalized versions of my favorite vehicles and spending gold (with no real-money microtransactions) on other players’ designs in the online marketplace, such as a brilliant Wagon Star modeled after a GameCube, complete with the iconic handle and controller ports.

Road Trip serves as the single-player campaign, offering a surprisingly epic story. Similar to Smash Ultimate’s World of Light, it repackages all of Air Riders’ modes into bite-sized challenges as you level up your machine. A single playthrough takes about 90 minutes, guiding you through hub worlds where you select challenges based on their rewards and encounter various Kirby series references. It’s a fun diversion and a great way to unlock more content, though I personally prefer the main modes. Many of Road Trip’s challenges focus on one-on-one combat, requiring you to destroy a specific rival. This highlights the control scheme’s biggest weakness; it lacks the precision needed for targeted combat. While attacking works well in City Trial’s chaotic group battles, trying to hunt down a single opponent on a frantic racecourse is often frustrating, demonstrating where Air Riders pushes its minimalist controls past their breaking point.

Countless small details elevate the entire package. The distinct creative flair of director Masahiro Sakurai is fully present: a character select screen with an announcer who shouts your machine and rider’s name, deeply customizable rulesets, and a music player that lets you set track frequency for different modes. Air Riders is undeniably a well-crafted game, maintaining a consistently high standard of quality throughout the entire experience.

(Source: IGN)