Sometimes it can feel like the gaming industry has lost its purity. The modern landscape is infested by pests in the form of platforms that don’t work unless you’re constantly online, half-finished games going for full price, disks and cartridges that have no actual content on them, games available for a limited time left unpreserved and unplayable, and the encroaching specter of AI — all in service of experiences looking to be the next Fortnite instead of something original and fun. Kirby Air Riders is free from all of those issues, instead focusing on being a genuinely enjoyable game.
For better or for worse, Kirby Air Riders feels like it’s from the early 2000s, similar to its predecessor, 2003’s Kirby Air Ride on the GameCube. It’s simple in a way that will turn off the player looking for the next cinematic, narrative-driven action-adventure, but will be catnip to those who value a game whose mechanics feel good to execute endlessly, regardless of graphics or story.
The simplicity of Air Riders is juxtaposed to its director’s previous game, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. In 2018, Masahiro Sakurai made the biggest Smash yet, as the title suggests, taking years of post-release development and placating a fanbase that had hulking expectations, ending up with the third best selling game on Nintendo Switch. Sakurai seemed to have a blank check after Ultimate, and he spent it on a sequel to a poorly-reviewed Kirby racing game.
The uninitiated might view Air Riders as copying Mario Kart’s homework, especially with Mario Kart World, the latest in the series, releasing mere months ago. However, a few hours with Air Riders reveals the nuance and depth of its gameplay, the distinctness of this flavor of racing game and its sensory, chaotic, and strategic appeal. Mario Kart has to work as an entry point to gaming, something slow and comprehensible enough for your grandma to pick up. Air Riders is unencumbered by that, able to break racing game conventions and throw all sorts of madness at the screen.
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Perfecting the Air Ride Formula
In its most basic state, Kirby Air Riders is able to trap you in a loop of satisfying muscle memory. Air Ride mode, where the player laps around a track in a third-person perspective, is perfectly manufactured. The UI is slick yet unobstructive, speed lines popping up at the exact right moments. The haptics of the Switch 2 Joy Cons and Pro Controller add a reality to every boost and bump. Most importantly, the mix of Riders and Machines (this game’s version of Karts) makes for incredibly deep gameplay.
Kirby Air Riders plays like a game from the early 2000s, and that’s it’s greatest strength.
Nintendo
Instead of some Machines simply being lighter or packed with a better acceleration, the vehicles in Kirby Air Riders have their own personalities, their strengths and weaknesses so distinct and sometimes only applicable in specific situations. Additionally, each course plays to the strengths of every machine, if you work hard enough to understand them. If the player chooses the Winged Star, they’re gonna spend the entire race looking for opportunities to ramp off into the sky, but if they have the Vampire Star, they’re aiming to hunt down and attack fellow racers and enemies, even if that means taking a slight detour to get a good speed boost.
The Riders themselves add another layer of strategy due to their special abilities, a mechanic not present in the GameCube version. Some Specials are destructive, like Pink Kirby’s rampaging sword; others are about speed, like Rick’s ability to hop off his Machine and run his little legs at 100 miles per hour. There are so many ways to play in Air Ride mode alone, it’ll take hours for players to land on a configuration they reliably fall back on.
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Its many modes leave room for variety, but all are predicated on some kind of chaos.
Nintendo
The courses, and the visuals of the game in general, exist on a spectrum of fine to great. Like so many other games, Air Riders’ first level is a boring, grassy field, and the reintroduction of the first level of the original game means Air Riders has a couple duds off the bat. However, there are other courses that just sing. Checker Knights, Crystalline Fissure, and Cavernous Corners are highlights of both Air Riders and the graphical capability for the Switch 2. The latter in particular has a gorgeous overground section matched with a hellish underworld stretch, the blending of which make for some of Nintendo’s finest graphical work, with a masterpiece of a soundtrack to boot.
More Than Just Racing
For as terrific as Air Ride mode is, players will likely spend more time in the City Trial and Road Trip modes, the former being a chaotic rogue-like and the latter being the game’s story mode. City Trial is the biggest departure from the racing game formula, giving the player access to a city (called Skyah) full of power-ups that can turn a slow moving Machine into an offensive beast or a lightning-quick glider, depending on which power-ups they happen to pick up. What City Trail does expertly is give the player a small amount of control over their build, crafting random apocalyptic events to rain down on Skyah that could either tank their machine or grant the player a chance to snag a Legendary Machine.
The roster of lovable Dreamland characters are delightful.
Nintendo
City Trial demands that the player submits to it, that they let go of the desire to control the character and embrace the chaos. Skyah is also full of secrets and easter eggs that players might only catch a glimpse of the first time around. After five minutes of roaming around Skyah, the player is taken to a stadium where races or battles commence that may or may not align with the strengths of the machine they’ve built. It gives the player just enough control for them to think, “I know I can do better next time.” City Ride is the biggest way in which Air Riders breaks the racing game formula, how many others have rogue-likes that focus on exploration?
Road Trip, another new addition for Air Riders, is less successful. This time the player is building up a vehicle more methodically, entering short challenges that reflect the other modes in the game to gain specific power-ups. Despite the gameplay itself being no different from Air Riders’ other modes, the difficulty curve in Road Trip starts out shockingly low and remains there for a while, even on hard mode. If not for the process of building a Machine, the player might find themselves gravitating towards the online modes for more of a challenge. Still, the compelling story doled out through occasional cut scenes is a fascinating one for those interested in new additions to Kirby lore, with backstories for the Machines and their link to the series God-like presence, Galactic Nova. This means Road Trip is far from a complete bust.
It may seem like Mario Kart at a glance, but its gameplay couldn’t be more different.
Nintendo’s longstanding philosophy of gameplay over everything has given them a reputation of a company committed to purity in gaming. That reputation has taken damage in recent years, but Kirby Air Riders feels reminiscent of a time where the ‘friendly gaming corporation’ idea was easier to buy into. Sakurai also declared that the game would receive no DLC — and why should it? It doesn’t need to manufacture replayability through additional content, because after a single race the player is determined to turn that one corner better, take advantage of that ramp, use more power ups or stick that landing better for an extra speed boost. You don’t go back to it because they put Sora in the game, but because it’s really fun.
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Air Riders is not pushing the boundaries of gaming, and works best as a slice of comfy nostalgia for a simpler era, but it’s also further proof that the passion project from a famed director is worth pursuing, even if it’s a borderline remake of a game he made 22 years ago. Gaming needs people willing to indulge a creator rather than an investor. Coming after Smash Ultimate, in the first year of the Switch 2, and amongst a barrage of hero-shooters, Kirby Air Riders feels like a reset button, for Sakurai, for Nintendo, for the industry.
Kirby Air Riders is out Nov. 20 for Nintendo Switch 2.
