Kirby Air Riders Review – Speedy Sakurai Sampler

Kart racing fans have been eating hearty in 2025, with the arrival of the ambitious Mario Kart World and solidly-entertaining Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds, and now they have a chance to end the feast in an unexpected fashion with Kirby Air Riders. Released on the Gamecube back in 2003, the original Kirby Air Ride wasn’t exactly a smash hit, critically or commercially, but series creator Masahiro Sakurai has seen his star rise precipitously thanks to another Smash (Bros.) hit – enough so that he’s managed to make Kirby Air Riders happen after two decades of series dormancy.

Does Kirby Air Riders boost the series to new heights? Or should it have stayed confined to the 'cube? Ride on for the pink puffball particulars.

For those unfamiliar with the series, Kirby Air Riders' approach to racing is suitably quirky, in a Sakurai kind of way. Kirby and his crew ride various floating and simple wheeled machines, which all accelerate on their own with no input required from the player. Instead, the focus is on almost continually boosting your speed in various ways.

The primary way to gain speed is by using a Boost Charge -- hold down B to slow down, then release to boost. While you can do this at any time, it's best to use it to slingshot yourself around corners. Hitting jumps will also send most machines gliding through the air and touching down gently will give you a boost. So will sucking up or otherwise defeating enemies strewn around tracks or keeping up with the sparkly trails left behind by rival racers. Of course, this being a kart racer (of a sort), there are also ways to take it to opponents offensively. Sucking up certain enemies will grant you Copy Abilities and, new to this game, each racer now has a powerful Special you can unleash after filling a bar by defeating enemies or taking damage.

If this all sounds like quite a bit to keep track of for an arcade racer, well, it is. On paper, Kirby Air Riders is supposed to be more accessible than other games in the genre with its simple controls, but in practice, it's much like Sakurai's Super Smash Bros. franchise -- a deceptively complicated and idiosyncratic game that many might take a while to cotton to. Honestly, I think many of the young or inexperienced players who are purportedly Kirby Air Riders’ target demographic will find the game a bit perplexing and intimidating.

It isn't just Kirby Air Riders’ mechanics that are a bit out there; the game’s course design is also wild, often resembling a particularly frenzied 3D Sonic level more than a typical race track. Courses are filled with twisting, turning paths that would be almost impossible to stay on at the speed most machines move in this game, but Sakurai doesn't care about old-fashioned notions like "you should try to stay on the track in a racing game." Pshaw! Invisible walls keep you roughly confined to the course as you ping-pong and boost your way past opponents.

Like Smash Bros., races in Kirby Air Riders often feel like barely-contained chaos, which can be a blast at times! To be clear, Kirby Air Riders is a weird-ass racing game, but it's often a fun and stimulating one. The game's courses are almost all gorgeous and blast at you at a flawless 60fps, even when things are going completely buck wild. I do wish there were more of them, though, as this game only serves up 9 new and 9 returning tracks, with the old tracks generally being a bit simpler and less exciting than the new ones.

Of course, this is a Sakurai game, so there's a lot more on offer than just straightforward racing. Arguably, this series' signature mode is City Trial, a sort of vehicular-combat-meets-party-game competitive romp that sees up to 16 players blast around a small open city stage for five minutes, collecting power-boosting items and switching machines as they see fit, before hopping into random minigames. This time around, a number of additional random events have been added to the city exploration phase, including new boss fights. Ultimately, depending on the type of machine you're using and the stats you've built up, you may have an advantage in a selected minigame or you may find yourself royally boned. Luck of the draw.

While Kirby Air Ride fanatics (a niche that actually does exist, I promise) swear by City Trial, I can't say I was blown away by this version of it. The mode’s a fun-enough old-school multiplayer experience, but the city portion of it is too frantic to really allow for much strategy and the minigame trials at the end range widely in quality. Some are quite fun (I'm partial to the Skydive event that has you collecting points by plunging through rings and the Drag Race that challenges you to go as fast as you can down a straightaway littered with various ramps and boost opportunities) while others are, frankly, kind of annoying. There's also the basic fact that Kirby Air Riders' controls just don't work very well in an open 3D space like the city.

Also returning is Top Ride mode, a series of simple top-down racing tracks in the vein of retro classics like R.C. Pro-Am. I quite enjoyed Top Ride, as it actually controls very well (unlike most top-down racers of the past) although you can see pretty much everything the mode has to offer in approximately 20 minutes.

All the above-mentioned modes can be played online, although during my (admittedly limited) time playing online with other reviewers and with the general public during the Global Test Ride demo, I did notice some connection hiccups. Given Smash’s not-so-smashing history with janky online play, that was a bit worrisome.

New to Kirby Air Riders is a full-fledged story mode, Road Trip. Each level in the campaign is represented as a road marked by various stops where players can choose what kind of challenge (lifted from the game’s three other modes) to take on. Succeed in the challenge and you'll level up and earn a specific boost for your character. Along the way, you will also buy upgrades, battle bosses, and choose to befriend certain characters, which will determine the branching path you take through the campaign (the story stays the same regardless, though).

Road Trip is a welcome addition to Kirby Air Riders in theory, but in practice, it feels a bit too similar to Smash Bros' often-underwhelming story modes. The challenges you take on are very brief and trivially easy until quite near the end of the campaign, when they flip and become difficult in an often-frustrating way.

The leveling process also doesn't quite work -- early on, you're so underpowered and slow that challenges feel dull, but toward the end of the story you're so maxed out you almost break the game. For instance, I invested a lot of points into the Glide stat, which meant I could basically hit a single ramp and fly over an entire course at top speed without ever touching down. Cool in a way, I guess, but it kind of felt like a cheat and there were times I was so fast, so powerful in certain ways, that some boss fights and challenges actually became more frustrating. You’re definitely going to want to play through Road Trip at least once, because its story is well and truly bonkers (in a good way), but, personally, I’m not sure how often I’m going to be replaying the mode.

This is the issue with Kirby Air Riders in general. Sakurai has certainly offered up a varied box of chocolates: in addition to the game's four core modes, there's all sorts of other wacky cruft packed in here, including the ability to customize your machines and display them in one of several showrooms, buy cute hats for all the game's characters, and collect gummies. Yes, gummies. Why? So you can pile them up and knock them around, that's why.

Really, the whole gummies thing is sort of a reflection of Kirby Air Riders as a whole. Sakurai has packed this game with whatever tickled his fancy, but most of those things aren't particularly well-developed. The question of “Why is this in here?” is often left unanswered. You can see most of what Kirby Air Riders has to offer in around 5 or 6 (often-exhilarating!) hours, but I'm not sure how many folks will put in a lot of time beyond that unless they’re Air-Ride-or-die fanatics interested in total mastery or endless City Trial rematches.

This review was based on a copy of Kirby Air Riders provided by Nintendo.

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