Jack's WebZone / Reviews

9.8.26 Kirby Air Riders (2026)

Kirby Air Ride for GameCube is almost certainly my #1 video game of all time, both in ranking and in sheer time played. I am not much of a gamer as an adult, so for years any time there was a Nintendo Direct I would just ask my friends—jokingly—to let me know if they announced Kirby Air Ride 2. You can imagine when the Air Riders trailer came out that my phone was going totally nuts. Months after release, I have finally obtained a Switch 2 and the sequel to my favorite game and I’m ready to decide if it’s good.

Impressions

It’s very cute how many characters you can choose from. the Kirby library is crammed with fun little guys. In Air Ride you could pick from a few colors of KirbyKeeby, I know,, Meta Knight (who was not very good) and King Dedede (who was very bad as a joke).

One of the best things about Air Ride is its attention to balance. Every machine handles and plays differently, including some very weird modes, and yet they all feel pretty fair in a race. In Riders the addition of stats per-character adds a little bit more of that MarioKart meta-seeking, but overall the balance is fine. I’ve played very little online, so if every lobby is crammed with the same guy/car combo deemed optimal I haven’t seen it.

The game looks great. Remaking something from a past graphical era is tricky, and subjective, but for me they pretty consistently thread the needle of what I imagined it might look like back in 2003. I love how offbeat and strange the Air Ride art direction is compared to every other Kirby game, and I’m happy to see that preserved here, including a faithful upscale of the original textures and skyboxes. The stuff that doesn’t align with my specific childhood imagining sticks out (those gray spots in Celestial Valley are puddles? I thought they were rocks) but overall great work.

The soundtrack is pretty good! Kirby music in general has always been the series’ big strength, and I was let down somewhat by Forgotten Land, which is pretty middle-of-the-road orchestral stuff with the exception of a few heaters. The new original songs are solid, if they are maybe a little too similar to each other, but the original Air Ride OST is so all-over-the-map weird that maybe it’s unfair to directly compare it.

My Bulleted List of Dumb Nitpicks (Feel Free to Skip)

They took away the boost panels at the end of Frozen Hillside. The ones you could use if you moved the glaciers apart? No idea why.
I can’t actually decide if I like this or not but every time there’s a halfpipe in a course (Frozen Hillside, Checker Knights) it still feels really wonky and bad to drive on just like the first game. I gurss it’s strange to change so much else about the machine handling and not fix this part.
In Air Ride 1, boost panels worked by adding a set number to your speed, so you could double-tap them if you were fast. I think this was a fun perk of getting good and now the boost panels work some other way that doesn’t allow it.
The strat where you could sort of abuse Wing Star’s air speed by pulling the stick back and bouncing along the ground has also been patched out.
Top Ride now uses all the machines instead of those two weird ones that were just for Top Ride. I guess Top Ride overall felt like sort of an afterthought, so this is not the worst way to bring it into the fold, but I also miss it feeling like a minigame.
All of the flavor text has been updated in such a clunky way to be twice as long but still just as unhelpful. Example: The description of Shadow Star used to say “Fly on evil wings! One hit punishes foes!” and is now “Attacks cause major damage, even on a single hit! Soars on sleek and shadowy wings while airborne.” It reads like they hit the Grammarly plagiarism-evasion button.
We all knew this was coming, but Swerve Star has been completely nerfed.

Notes on Gamefeel

Seeing this does feel good. Maybe I’m a sucker.

The thing that made Air Ride so genius was its simplicity. It uses one stick and one button and the way those two inputs steer you around is intuitive and smooth. The A button does everything (braking, boosting, inhaling enemies, using abilities) contextually, and you’d be surprised how infrequently it’s the wrong one. It feels great, I think even for someone just picking it up and not for someone who has spent 20 years wearing it in.

The racing in Air Ride is based on “boosts,” a slightly more versatile version of drifting in other racers. You hold A to slide on the floor going around a turn and release a burst of speed when you round the corner. Masahiro Sakurai himself has said that this “squeeze and release” feeling is the seed the entire game is designed around.

Air Riders inexplicably inserts a tiny pause between releasing the A button and your boost of speed. I guess the idea is to make boosting feel more dramatic and weighty, but it is so weird and off-throwing for somebody moving up from the GameCube that at first I thought I was doing something wrong. Overall the controlability of the machines feels looser and wilder. The endurance of Air Ride is that it offers a low entry barrier and extremely high skill ceilingI downloaded that clip a long time ago but I believe it’s from this channel. People play Air Ride competitively and technically and it rewards them for it. (I have entered a couple of tournaments and done middlingly.) Air Riders is, I guess, trying to rein these players back in while also opening the door to new ones. This is a fine idea, but being reined in always feels bad. I assumed I would be able to adjust pretty easily—I’ve played a previous version of this game for probably 1500 hours—but between the weird boosting hitch and the greasier machine handling I felt a lot more like I was starting over. Playing Air Riders for the first time with my partner, we both settled on Wagon Star—which doesn’t boost at all—because it was simpler to only worry about steering at this new higher speed.

A very fundamental mechanic in Air Ride is the Quick Spin, which you perform by wagging the stick left and right. The Quick Spin is an attack you can do at any time that grants you a few frames of invincibility and, depending on your stats, can do a lot of damage to an opponent. It takes some work to get the timing right, but it’s very powerful when you do.I’ll talk about MarioKart some more later, but I had this video idea kicking around for a while comparing Air Ride and the agency provided by the Quick Spin to the punishing inevitability of the red shell. Riders makes the Quick Spin basically obsolete; you still get a few I-frames but there are so many other options (special abilities, character-dependent attacks) that you sort of forget about it.

Cutter Ability? More Like Clutter It Visually

Dear Christ, there is just so much happening on the screen in this game. I’ve said before that because of what I played growing up—primarily Air Ride 1—I have a brain molded to enjoy casual and low-voltage games that are easy to grasp. Air Riders is an absolute barrage of UI elements, particle effects, alerts and alarms. A lot of the UI can be hidden in settings, and I have, but the default experience is brain-rattling compared to Air Ride.

Here’s a screenshot from Air Ride of the exact same scenario: lagging a little on the volcano rail in Magma Flows, charging up a plasma shot. Of course it’s in 4:3, which helps keep things in view, but also there are like five UI elements on the screen in total. I don’t need a live readout of how many yards behind me the next guy is. I don’t need a zoomed-in minimap of the next twenty feet of track; I can see in front of me. I don’t need all of these things to have fluttering, jagged Smash Ultimate drop shadows.

In general I think this is my primary complaint about Riders: the injection of flashiness and visual drama is eating away at the feel of the game. Cinematic camera pullbacks when you get on a rail feel like mid-race cutscenes. Air Ride has a mechainc where defeating an enemy gives you a small boost of speed, which is explained briefly and left as a subtle way to strategize. In Air Riders they kept this mechanic and illustrate it with clusters of orbs you collect from enemies like Minecraft experience points. The result is functionally the same but without the subtlety, and with one more glowing thing piled on your screen.

Every character has a “special attack” that, when charged, throws up an alert in the dead center of the screen begging you to use it. I bet there are optimal times to deploy these in a race, but I just hit it immediately to dismiss the pop-up 100% of the time.

If you wait until this goes away on its own you also don’t get to use your special anymore. lol.

Air Riders has taken a formula that worked because it was easy to understand and attempted to cram it with UI to create “depth” while also trying to keep the formula simple. This means most of the noise added to Air Riders on the visual end isn’t allowed to be important: it’s reiterating stuff you can already see, or providing info you can’t do anything useful with. In fairness, most of this stuff can be turned off.

Sometimes I see someone watching TikToks while driving, and the thought I always have (besides “you should go to jail”) is, “Is driving a car not mentally stimulating enough for you?” Kirby Air Riders is highly polished and does a lot of things right but there’s a layer of key-jangling on top of it all that I find distracting and, in my hater’s heart, kind of sad. They added a Smash-style announcer who pointlessly yells out the name of the menu item you just selected. Is this what it takes to keep the iPad generation engaged with a game that’s not a slot machine?

Some of the New Stuff is Good

Road Trip mode is a good solution to Air Ride’s kinda-weak solo experience. You play a chain of minigames and challenges to unlock cutscenes about the plot (which is a funny thing to add, but the cutscenes look fantastic and the plot is suitably insane). I liked this mode a lot, and it makes it easy to play Air Riders in increments shorter than seven minutes. On the larger scale, you spend dozens of rounds upgrading your chosen machine and testing its flexibility, so one Road Trip can offer interesting gameplay for a long time.

The new Air Ride courses are beautiful, and hit the right tone between could-have-belonged and showing off. They take some learning and trying (there are a lot of U-turns and hard corners that seem like they were designed in a slower-paced stage of development), but I’ve spent most of my time with Air Riders in Air Ride mode because it’s just the most fun.Okay, just to clarify: The entire game is called Air Ride, and it has three game modes, which are called Air Ride, Top Ride, and City Trial. Air Ride is the standard racing-game mode.

The new machines are neat, and do feel like they belong. I haven’t gotten good at them all yet, but I never got good at all the original machines either (who is maining Rex Wheelie?). Paper Star is especially fun in a race, because it feels the most like how gliding used to work.

City Trial: If It Ain’t Broke,

City Trial is the reason people are still playing Air Ride 25 years later. The idea is simple: Drive around an open map, gathering powerups and swapping vehicles, and then compete in a mystery challenge.

In Air Ride, the City Trial map is only as big as the constraints of the GameCube, and at max can host four players.16 if you connect over LAN, but I have never done this or even seen it. This makes most of the complexity emerge not from exploring the city—which has some secrets and corners, but is easily knowable—but from how you play against each other. Focus on gathering items and you’ll attract a fight. Focus too much on fighting and you’ll miss out on items. You can be a jerk and spend the whole game blowing up people’s cars or you can play evasively and stay on the move. The default Compact Star handles tightly but is kind of slow, meaning where you are on the map really matters. If the secret chamber in Castle Hall opens and you’re way at the other end of the island it’s a race to get there first.

A lot of playing City Trial is just cruising around semi-idly scooping items. It can be a leisurely, even slow game at times, but this doesn’t mean it’s starved for depth: the depth comes from the players. I’ve played hundreds of games of City Trial with my brother along all sorts of house rulesOur favorite being “compacts only,” where you have to keep and beef up the default car.. I’ve played extremely sweaty games of competitive one-on-one. I’ve played loads of quick CPU matches to unwind before bedtime. City Trial is brilliant and engaging because a lot of the way it feels is about how you decide to play.

Recently, I’ve also been playing some MarioKart World. I’m lukewarm on it, mostly because including 24 racers cranks up the gambling aspects of MarioKart over getting good (not that MarioKart has ever been fun to play with people who are really good, but still). That had me thinking about how increased processing power is the ultimate enabler of could-over-should in games. Does MarioKart need to threaten you with a randomly-initiated fall to twentieth place, or could it stick with twelve and make beating them more interesting?

Kirby Air Riders expands the City Trial map into a huge floating island webbed with hidden passageways, rails, caves and gimmicks. It packs this space with sixteen players at once. It’s an impressive tech demo, but unlike MarioKart, the added space and added challengers sort of cancel out. Air Riders' version of City Trial is about mazing through various trapdoors and tubes and occasionally running into someone else, but never strategizing or really fighting because you’re both on the way to some other cranny to hide. Several of the random events teleport everyone to the same spot because there’s no way you’d have all 15 opponents in view at once naturally.

I personally think this is the influence of Fortnite.

The version of Air Ride I play most often these days is on KARphin, a custom build of Dolphin Emulator optimized for KAR netplay. KARphin also lets you change game rules like which events or stadiums are active, and how often an event happens in the city. Obviously the first time I saw this I turned the event frequency all the way up for laughs and played a totally crazy match where nobody could do much thinking at all. Air Riders is like that by default. I’m not saying City Trial is a deeply cerebral game to begin with, but like with every aspect of Air Riders there is so much stuff packed in that you get very little room to maneuver. Items are five times as frequent, so everybody gets a ton of them, so they mean less. Events are sometimes literally back-to-back and either yank you out of the game to a fenced-in course or are happening somewhere else closer to an opponent. The #1 word I would use here is “hectic.” Initially I was kind of sad the original city map isn’t unlockable, but playing on that stage with these rules would be so cramped. I don’t see why the same high-skill play couldn’t evolve in Air Riders, but anyone who currently plays high-level Air Ride 1 is back at square one.

The Verdict

I don’t want to say Kirby Air Riders is bad. It’s a miracle that they even remember this weird obscure game I happen to love—in fact it had sat abandoned for so long that one of those indie spiritual remakes was in development. I’ve still been playing it a lot and appreciating the polish and the craft and trying to figure out what the “gummies” feature is about. It’s good that the Switch 2 can render enough enemies that Kirby Melee 2 doesn’t feel totally deserted. It’s funny that the food items are still cut-out stock photos but are now in 4K. Road Trip mode is great. And a lot of the core stuff I liked is still here, just wrapped in a layer of noise and AAA choices and other stuff I find kind of annoying.

Kirby Air Riders displays a lot of the universal trends that have put me off modern video games: that could-over-should philosophy of adding every possible feature and making every game a massive project that aims to be its players’ main pastime. The casual game is largely dead outside of indie oddities, and what gets made now is something that, even if it contains much of the soul of something I love, still makes me feel kind of old. I guess that’s what a remake is all about.

Miscellaneous

View List