More than 20 years after Kirby Air Ride zoomed onto the Nintendo GameCube, the cult classic racing game has gotten a sequel. This time around, Kirby is joined by a plethora of allies and foes for an over-the-top racing experience. Kirby Air Riders takes everything that made the original game fresh and exciting, and dials them up to an 11. Out of the garage Kirby Air Riders presents a racing experience unlike any game in the genre. While the original game could be played entirely with a single button, Kirby Air Riders makes a dramatic shift by expanding that number to two. Your vehicle, known in-game as a “Machine,” moves forward automatically. Therefore, your inputs are for turning, boosting, attacking, and using items. It’s a deceptively simple premise, as Kirby Air Riders quickly reveals itself to have far more depth than one may have ever considered. Each of the 25 Machines in Air Riders have their own attribute distribution, affecting their speed, controlling, weight, and so on. Additionally, nearly all of them have a special feature that impacts their performance. For example, the Winged Star is slower on the ground, but moves quickly through the air and can be controlled with ease while gliding. The Wagon Star can’t boost charge, but has high values in key stats like Max HP and Grip. This variety also extends to the actual racers. While the original Kirby Air Ride limited players to Kirby and their multicolored counterparts, Kirby Air Riders expands to a proper roster of characters from the Kirby universe. This includes fan favorites like Meta Knight and King Dedede, as well as deep cuts like Daroach and Lololo & Lalala. Finding the Rider and Machine combo that best fits your playstyle is a key component of the Kirby Air Riders Journey. Throughout my entire time playing for review, I never got tired of mixing and matching combinations, and I felt encouraged to experiment as I tried my hand at KAR’s (Kirby Air Rider’s) various game modes. On the road again Kirby Air Riders boasts four core game modes: Air Ride, Top Ride, City Trial, and Road Trip. The first three can be played solo against bots, or online. Air Ride is your straightforward racing mode. Select a track, Rider, and Machine, and set your rules. Similar to the Super Smash Bros. games, which were also developed by Masahiro Sakurai and Hal Labs, you can set the difficulty level for CPU riders on a scale of 1-10. Air Ride is an easy way to get a grasp of the game’s controls and systems while passively unlocking new Riders and Machines. Top Ride offers an alternate way to race by zooming out and putting the game in a top-down perspective. You can still boost, grab items, and attack other players, but the change in perspective means you can see every racer at all times. Top Ride is a welcomed return, but I wish the tracks were more. sophisticated. The maps in Kirby Air Riders are filled with crazy jumps, loops, rails, and other disorienting hazards. In Top Ride, the tracks have been mostly flattened, with only a handful of obstacles sprinkled in. City Trial is the third returning mode in Kirby Air Riders, and keeping with the game’s overall theme, it’s more chaotic than it was in the first game. In City Trial, a lobby of players dash around a city map, collecting power ups to build their Machine on the fly, sabotage others, and even steal their machines in some cases. After the timer runs out, you compete in a challenge that you vote on, with specific Machine builds lending themselves to certain challenges rather than others. Of course, this is Kirby Air Riders, so the unwritten rules of racing games have been tossed out of the window. If you vote for a challenge at the end of a game, it’s what you play. If you’re the only person who voted for a challenge, you win by default! It’s a silly way to turn the “voting” mechanic on its head, and while it’s sometimes fun to earn points without doing anything, it can also feel anticlimactic. This is representative of my feelings about City Trial as a whole. There’s a general awkwardness to zipping around the map, smashing into power ups over and over as you wait for the game timer to run out. Even on lower limits, I found myself wanting to skip to the fun part (which was only fun on certain occasions). It doesn’t help that there’s only one map for City Trial, that while large, gets old pretty fast. It’s a disjointed mode that can be fun at times, but lacks the moment-to-moment excitement that makes the other game modes so compelling. Perhaps the most interesting addition to Kirby Air Riders is Road Trip, the single-player story mode. This mode takes Kirby on, well, a road trip, through various biomes. As you mosey down a path, you can select to participate in races or other challenges, several of which are also featured at the end of City Trial. Defeating these challenges will net upgrades for Kirby’s machine, which you’ll need to beat the boss challenges that pop up at the end of a route. There are branching pathways in Road Trip, giving the mode a solid sense of replayability. It also dives into the lore of Kirby Air Riders, which is. pretty interesting! Showing off Where Kirby Air Riders sets itself apart from its competitors, is in its style and presentation. I mentioned earlier that it was developed by the minds behind the Super Smash Bros. series, and that’s evident from the moment you load in and play the first Lesson. From the bombastic commentator to the frenetic and in-your-face UI design, Kirby Air Riders makes every experience feel premium. Players are allowed to fine-tune their experience with custom options galore. There are a plethora of ways to tweak every game mode to your liking, whether it be difficulty, match length, or specific rules that make the game play exactly how you want. Even when you’re not actually racing, there’s still plenty to do. You’re constantly unlocking new content and crossing challenges of a checklist, which yield even more rewards that can be found in the Collection menu. Here, you customize your Machines, applying new paint jobs, patterns, decals, and parts to them. Once you’ve got a few machines that you’re proud of, you can start buying garages and put them on display. There’s a jukebox that lets you queue up your favorite tunes from the soundtrack. You can customize the License Card that other players see when you race against them online. You can track your personal best stats with every Machine across every map in every game mode. There’s just a ridiculous volume of stuff in this game. It won’t be anything less than an absolute buffet for Kirby fans, or anyone who just likes to get into the minutia with their racing games. Kirby’s grand prix While many initially scratched their heads at Nintendo’s decision to release two racing games-Kirby Air Riders and Mario Kart World-in the same calendar year, playing Kirby Air Riders reveals why they had no problem doing so. It’s a racing game that can’t be likened to anything else. It’s a classic arcade experience in all of the best ways, although some of its flaws come from that same philosophy. Kirby Air Riders is a beefy Switch 2 racer that’s constantly shifting gears, and it’s a damn good time behind the wheel. This review is based on a Switch 2 code provided by the publisher. Kirby Air Riders costs $69. 99 launches on November 20, 2025 for the Nintendo Switch 2.
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