Review: 'Kirby Air Riders' is frivolous, fleeting, and only fun with other people

One of the distinct joys of art is that sometimes you get to feel like you truly grasp something in a way other people don’t. This is the driving force behind "cult classics," those rare movies or games that get a lukewarm reception at release but turn out to be misunderstood gems. It’s fun to feel like you were right all along, but even more fun to feel like other people were wrong.

Take Kirby Air Ride, a vehicle-based action game starring Nintendo’s spherical pink icon Kirby, originally released for GameCube in 2003. One glance at its Metacritic page tells the whole story: Reviewers didn’t much care for it, but lots of gamers loved it, judging by the user score.

As someone who did play the original and found it kind of forgettable, I went into its Nintendo Switch 2 sequel Kirby Air Riders hoping to be won over. I so badly wanted to believe the critics got it wrong, and expanding the game with more characters, abilities, and modes would give Kirby a triumphant return that proved the haters wrong. 

That didn’t happen. Kirby Air Riders may have more going for it than its predecessor, but that’s not saying much. This is still a thin racing action game with one cool mode and a whole lot of "bleh" around it, including a miserable single-player experience.

For Nintendo nerds, it’s cool that Air Riders exists at all

Most of the racing tracks look fantastic. Credit: Nintendo

Before I get to all the stuff that bums me out about Air Riders, I want to make one thing clear: I’m happy this game exists, if for no other reason than it’s the first big Kirby game directed by series creator Masahiro Sakurai in more than 20 years. You may or may not know Sakurai from being the public face of the Super Smash Bros. series, but Kirby is his baby, and it makes me happy to know that he got to make something of a passion project for himself before presumably getting back into the Smash mines.

Air Riders also feels like a much-deserved celebration of Kirby in general. It’s full of playable characters who range from basic Kirby enemies to Kirby’s friends or even major villains from throughout the series. The soundtrack mixes great original tracks with fresh re-arrangements of classic Kirby songs, and I would say the music is probably the best thing about Air Riders in general. It’s also a visual feast for the young Switch 2 console, with an exceptionally vibrant color palette, racetracks with awesome-looking setpieces and scenery, and a (from what I can tell) flawless 60 frames per second frame rate holding it all together.

Air Riders looks and sounds great, but then you have to actually play it.

But there’s ultimately almost no meat on the bone here

Same, homies. Credit: Nintendo

In case you never played the original Air Ride or missed the marketing or public beta weekends for Air Riders, the key thing to know about it mechanically is that there’s no accelerate button. You are always accelerating automatically. There are only two buttons, one that slams the brakes (while also charging up a speed boost that activates once you let go), and another that activates your chosen character’s special ability once a meter is full.

Add in a spin attack that you can do by wiggling the left stick back and forth, and that’s your entire moveset. Air Riders is, to its credit, very easy to learn thanks to its inherent simplicity as well as a series of playable tutorials that make sure none of the nuances (which mostly exist in the form of vehicles that all control and behave pretty differently) get past the player. Unlike most driving games, vehicles in Air Riders can fly, so doing the tutorials is at least worth it to learn how that all works.

The problem is that there just isn’t a whole lot to do once you’ve finished the tutorials. You can compete against CPUs or friends in the racing-based Air Ride mode, the top-down Top Ride mode, and the more open-ended action mode City Trial, or check out Road Trip, which technically counts as a single-player story mode. More on that later.

City Trial was the highlight of the GameCube original, and it’s still the main reason to play its sequel. This mode places up to 16 players in a big city map for exactly five minutes, during which time they have to find vehicles and power them up by collecting items that spawn in a variety of ways. You can destroy boxes to juice up your car, but random challenges like short races or even boss fights will appear from time to time, each coming with the opportunity to collect a lot of power-ups simply by participating in them.

I love this guy. Credit: Nintendo

Once those five minutes are up, players are cordoned off into Stadiums, which are basically just mini-games. Some of them prioritize speed, others prioritize flight or combat ability. City Trial is all about embracing whatever machine you ended up with and whatever stats it has at the end of the match, and just trying your best in whichever Stadium you do. There are technically winners and losers, but really, the joy here is in zooming around a map for five minutes and collecting floating icons that make numbers go up. 

Air Riders is at its best when City Trial is at its most hectic, with meteors raining from the sky or some wacky boss wrecking the place while everyone is just trying to power up their ride. I do find some joy in getting to the point where my vehicle is so fast that it’s barely controllable, but that also makes completing specific challenges not especially fun at times. Still, City Trial (especially online, and especially with people you know) is a good time. 

I wish I felt the same about Air Ride, the racing mode. These races aren’t terrible by any means, but they’re usually exceedingly short and insubstantial. City Trial works as well as it does largely because it’s full of random nonsense that can throw you off your game or work to your benefit. Air Ride races, meanwhile, are kind of the same every time, unless you really get into trying different combinations of characters and vehicles. I appreciate that every character can suck up enemies on the road and copy their powers like Kirby can, but even those abilities only add a tiny bit of variety to the proceedings. 

Top Ride is also barely worth talking about. These mechanics don't translate super well to a top-down perspective, and making turns can be more of a chore than I'd like. It feels like a Mario Party mini-game.

City Trial and (to a lesser extent) Air Ride are where you’ll spend most of your time in Air Riders, as they both support local and online multiplayer. Speaking of online, you can host a bunch of friends in a paddock, which works as a social lobby where you can show off your characters or rides, which can be customized using unlockable parts and decals. It’s fun to jump around and do dumb emotes for a while before a City Trail match.

Road Trip is a bust

Imagine doing this for 90 minutes. Credit: Nintendo

Unfortunately, there is also a single-player side of Air Riders. Road Trip is an approximation of a solo adventure mode in which you choose a rider and spend somewhere between 60 and 90 minutes completing challenges, collecting machines, powering up said machines, and occasionally fighting bosses. Most of the challenges are plucked from the other modes; short races on Air Ride tracks or Stadium sessions against CPUs make up the bulk of Road Trip’s runtime. Every now and then, you see an uninteresting cutscene as a reward for your efforts, too.

In theory, I’m sort of into a roguelike mode where, by the end, you have a big roster of souped-up machines. Sadly, Road Trip is immeasurably dull. Challenges quickly become repetitive, as you might find yourself doing the same race on the same slice of the same Air Ride track half a dozen times during one Road Trip. I also found that the challenge level stayed pretty much the same throughout. Challenges only got more difficult near the end of a run for me, and only because my machines were so powered up that they became more difficult to control. I actively disliked the late-game boss fights that required a slight modicum of precision, which is not really what Air Riders is good at.

I just can’t personally see myself playing any more of Road Trip than I had to for the purposes of writing this review. At best, it’s somewhat pleasant and boring. At worst, it’s actively frustrating and, again, felt like a chore. I did, on occasion, get a small dopamine rush from completing in-game achievements to fill out a big checklist, which sometimes rewarded me with new characters to play as or new machines to use. The problem with this is that a huge majority of those achievements reward you with stickers or other cosmetic items instead. I can see younger players finding that more satisfying than I do, but that doesn't really do a lot for me personally.

Kirby Air Riders, in that sense, simultaneously has a lot to do and next to nothing to do. You can theoretically pump hours and hours into this game to unlock everything, but the process of doing that isn’t particularly enjoyable beyond the satisfaction of completing something. Air Riders is overflowing with stuff, but most of it is truly just “stuff,” if you catch my drift. 

Critics in 2003 were right

I was not reviewing video games in 2003 because I was nine years old. Playing Kirby Air Riders in this capacity made me feel some solidarity with reviewers from back then, though, as I think this game is roughly as good in a 2025 context as that one was in a 2003 context. Unfortunately, the 2025 version costs $69, and it's just not worth that much.

Yes, the sequel has more playable characters, machines, ways to customize both of those things, and tons of other crap to unlock. The new and improved City Trial mode is genuinely a lot of fun at times, too, and Air Riders is a gorgeous game both visually and aurally. Longtime Kirby aficionados will also surely enjoy the amount of fan service at work here.

But Air Riders still feels woefully thin to me. If you aren’t playing City Trial online, you might as well just play something else. Air Ride mode wears out its welcome pretty quickly, and Road Trip is only marginally more fun than driving across Kansas in real life. 

I just don’t think there’s enough hidden depth here to make even City Trial interesting for more than a couple of weeks. All I wanted out of this game was to be persuaded that the original Air Ride was secretly great and just needed a second chance to truly shine. Needless to say, I remain unconvinced.

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Credit: Nintendo

'Kirby Air Riders'

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