Kirby Air Riders

Switch 2 Review 

Kirby Air Riders is the 2025 racing game sequel to the original Kirby Air Ride from 2003 on the Nintendo GameCube.

It sees players racing through four main modes of Air Ride, Top Ride, City Trial, and the brand-new Road Trip Story mode either locally or online apart from Road Trip.

Pros:

Art Style.

Kirby Air Riders has had a large graphical overhaul in comparison to the original game on GameCube over a decade ago.

The graphical improvement is most easily seen with the new exclusive courses for Air Ride mode as they are much grander in scale and complexity like “Waveflow Waters” and “Cyberion Highways” showcasing fast-paced action with a lot of particle effects without a drop in performance.

The most impressive track that overshadowed everything else in the game was the final unlockable track in the game. The track is hidden behind the Checklist system after winning 15 races in Air Ride mode and is also the final track the player races on in the True Ending in Road Trip on New Game+ meaning finishing Road Trip twice (Once on standard and the second on New Game+).

Riders.

One big limitation of the original game was the very small character and roster that sees the player mainly use the different coloured Kirby forms as Riders with King Dedede and Mega Knight as unlockable “Vehicles.”

Now there are 21 characters that the player can unlock through the various achievements for performing certain actions across the various four modes of the game. This means now there are characters from all across the franchise with almost every videogame having at least one representative as either a Rider, fodder enemy on a track, or a boss in City Trial/Road Trip.

Players start with 4 playable characters on a fresh save file being Kirby, King Dedede, Meta Knight and Waddle Dee and all the rest and alternative colour skins are unlocked with the achievement system by completing various challenges with every Racer having at least 1 alternative colour scheme to unlock and use.

Machines.

Kirby Air Riders returns with its main draw, aside from the new character roster, is there expanded garage of Machines to ride now at 28 and all original 18 machines return.

So, Air Riders adds 10 new Machines making their introduction in this game. These are the Hop, Vampire, Paper, Chariot, Battle Chariot, Tank, Bull Tank, Transform star. Alongside the new Machines there are also two new Legendary Machines with the Gigantes and Leo (Both of which are legendary like Dragoon and Hydra)

My favourite machine in this game is the new Vampire Star that I would recommend for aggressive players as it has an auto attack when boosting which gives an increase in stats after it “Bites” an opponent or fodder enemy for a limited time, making it a very useful Machine on rulesets with limited or no Copy Abilities on.

Customisation.

The customisation for the Machines in this game goes above and beyond what I expected especially from a Kirby game.

As players are free to customise each Machine with custom decals they unlock from achievements or items to the shop. This has led to an explosion of player creativity from recreating previous consoles like the GameCube inspired Wagon Star or a Kyogre themed Vampire Star.

Players can also upload their creations for other players to download and use in game after spending in game currency (No Microtransactions) 

This rewards going through and unlocking the various achievements in the game through the checklist system, as players will keep unlocking new Machines and customisation options.

Road Trip.

This is the new story mode for this game that was not in the original Air Ride game and uses the mechanics from City Trial where players try to gather as many stat boosts to keep building up their Racer over 12 chapters of the new story mode.

During Road Trip players are set along a track with three lanes to choose from and hop between. Then on set intervals players will encounter challenges that reward a stat boost or item to make the journey easier for the next encounter.

Road Trip also takes inspiration from Super Smash Brawl’s Subspace Emissary mode by telling a story through its many cutscenes unlocked after beating bosses after certain chapters.

Online.

Players can play online across all of its three main modes but not Road Trip unfortunately.

Air Ride the flagship mode allows 6 players online to race together that while less than other racing games still feels like plenty due to all the enemies on the tracks to inhale or attack.

Top Ride has 8 players online to race around the Micro Machines style courses with a top-down perspective in race that are very short but chaotic for a quick burst of fun with friends.

City Trial now boasts 16 players online for its dedicated mode that was one of the first to have a Roguelike mode where players compete against other real players or CPUs for collectible power ups to increase their racer’s stats to perform better at the events.

All these modes are vastly more fun in online or with friends in local wireless play to really ramp up the hectic nature that only other real players can give in competitive racing.

Gameplay feels.

This is a category more difficult to describe but the game feels a lot smoother even though it is still a predominantly a single button game with “B” used for drifting around corners and build up a charged boost.

The players boost around corners and accelerate to fast speeds after slowing down by charging the boost. The game accelerates the player so you do not need to focus on holding down an accelerator button instead only on “B” for braking and boosting round corners.

Tutorials.

The best tutorials I have ever seen in a racing game, even though the controls for Air Riders are a lot simpler than any other racing game on the market.

The tutorials include full videos of each technique being taught before the player recreates them and the game makes sure that the player can use each technique of the game before moving on.

I would recommend every player goes through the tutorial system since it is short but robust with teaching players how to use each Copy Ability, so players do not have to try and work it out in the middle of a random race or Stadium event.

User interface.

When first loading into Kirby Air Riders players can immediately tell that this is a Masahiro Sakurai production due to the quality and uniqueness of its User Interface and layout.

As he also worked on Super Smash Bros. Melee and Brawl with his studio and that same high quality and polish from those menus and colours carries over to Air Riders.

It is in stark contrast to a lot of other modern era games where the menus feel very derivative and simple without that sense of whimsy and fun from a Sakurai game.

Accessibility.

Kirby Air Riders does a phenomenal job in the accessibility department and showcases how basic of a job Mario Kart World did in comparison.

As players are free to rebind all the controls since Air Riders is a two-button control scheme system, so players of all mobility types can play the game and have fun together.

Another feature that I found useful was to turn off the camera shaking when boosting or going through high-speed environments, whilst also being able to zoom out the camera for City Trial, this made it much more enjoyable and less motion sickness.

Players can also put a filter over the game for three kinds of colour blindness people with red, green, and blue filters. In addition, players can also put an outline around their character and others to help stand out against the environment if they blend in too much while at speed.

Players can also turn up or down the opacity of the User Interface elements like that of the Speedometer and other parts.

Music.

Kirby always does a fantastic job with its soundtrack and Air Riders delivers again with songs that match their respective courses perfectly.

The best song is the opening track the theme song, “Starlit Journey” was a great song and is available in both Japanese or English. With the Japanese version being available on Nintendo Music if playing an English copy of the game.

I am surprised the song did not play more across the Road Trip story mode as it is only used for the opening cutscene for the game and an instrumental version for the City Trial mode in Skyah.

Players can access the music for the various tracks to listen to in the multiplayer paddock with a jukebox. Players can also customise which song plays more often in City Trial mode too to fit their preference.

My favourite in game songs for tracks were Mount Amberfalls and Steamgust Forge. This either helped the serenity of the tracks or the frantic nature of a heavily industrialised city filled with contraptions and high-speed trains.

Online.

The online modes for Kirby Air Riders really impressed me as during my time playing the game online, I never had any disconnects or crashes.

This is compared to Mario Kart World that still has common disconnects or booting players from lobbies even now several months after launch.

However, City Trial has 16 players all at once playing together and aside from the frame rate drops with more players, it still keeps everyone in the same game.

Cons:

Track amount.

While Air Riders does bring back all the original Air Ride tracks in addition to the 9 new tracks for this game to bring the total to 18 tracks overall.

However Top Ride suffers as it does not bring back those original tracks instead like Air Ride mode does, so instead players only have the new courses only.

Then City Trial just has the one map only even though it has capacity for 16 players to play on it all at once online.

So overall the number of tracks does feel extremely light with Top Ride and City Trial mode, this leads to these modes not being used as much since the tracks get very repetitive after a while even though both modes are very fun.

As Mario Kart World has 30 tracks available to race on compared to 18 for Air Riders main racing mode.

Track selection.

While Air Ride starts with 9 new tracks for this game all the tracks play it very safe and do not reference the franchise, much beyond Galactic Nova making an appearance for the story.

This is more baffling since the games allows players to choose characters from across the entire franchise since 1992, but the various worlds from those games are not included.

Instead, it is more generic biomes and themes like Beach or Cyberspace instead of King Dedede’s castle or the new world of the Ancients from the Forgotten Land game.

Skyah.

This is the replacement for “The City” from the original game and as a whole Skyah is a much bigger map for players to explore in City Trial mode.

However just like the original game there is only one map available for City Trial mode, so after finishing both playthroughs of Road Trip mode and several hours of the dedicated City Trial mode the map of Skyah gets very repetitive.

I would prefer in future for more maps to be available that take advantage of the other art styles from the game used for tracks in Air Ride mode. As the map does not use any of the cyber themes or steampunk factory from those specific tracks.

So, Skyah plays it very safe when it came to its map with the volcano zone being the most extreme out of the habitat zones on the map.

Quick Spin.

The player cannot use the Quick Spin attack unless the player quickly rocks the left thumb stick left and right or shakes the controller.

This means that players with mobility issues will have a harder time using this mechanic compared to other players, so it would be good to have an accessibility option to instead also perform it by pressing a single button since the game only uses 2 buttons for its control scheme for special attacks or brake/boost.

Rider customisation.

While the customisation for the machines is very in-depth the same cannot be said for the characters.

This is because instead the characters only have one or two alternate-coloured skins except Kirby who being the main character of the franchise has over five alternative skins to choose for himself. 

Apart from that the other means of customising the player character is to wear one of a couple dozen of hats. However these hats still clip through the character models instead of fitting each character specifically, with Meta Knight as the obvious example with a lot of hats clipping through his mask and armour.

Frame rate.

The game aims for a stable 60fps and while in Docked mode it does stick close to that goal aside from City Trial, but it is surprising that there is not an option for 120fps since it is a fast-paced racing game.

This is where hitching can be noticed and a small amount of dropped frames due to the amount of players and particle effects happening on the screen at once.

The game gets a lot more noticeable frame rate drops when playing in Handheld mode. As aside from the screen resolution drop the performance also starts to suffer.

Again, most easily seen with City Trial where it drops further than Docked Mode but still is able to be ignored due to the speed of the game, but I would recommend playing Docked Mode wherever possible for the smoothest experience.

It is in the split screen mode of the game that Air Riders really starts to struggle, especially with four players locally on the same Switch 2 console. As when playing City Trial with four players on one Switch 2 I found that the frame rate still stayed above 30fps but not that much higher when all the random events started.

Conclusion:

A great update to a classic GameCube title that evolves the franchise in every way possible.

I would highly recommend Kirby Air Riders to fans of the 2003 title, so much so that I prefer it over Mario Kart World released in 2025 that feels more disappointing now in comparison.

Score: 8.0