Of all the games annoucedby Nintendo for the Switch 2, Kirby Air Riders is perhaps the most surprising. A sequel to the GameCube’s Kirby Air Ride, the connective thread passes between a whole bunch of Smash Bros. titles, as Masahiro Sakurai takes the opportunity to revisit one of his decades old game ideas.
There is racing within Kirby Air Riders, though it’s quite a distance from the tone and pace of Mario Kart. Riding on a machine through a gameplay tutorial, we’re introduced to boost charging while drifting, angling your vehicle to fly or glide after jumping from a ramp, the importance of needing to stick the landing by having your craft parallel when landing. And then there’s the classic ability to gobble up and shoot them out as stars, pull off a spin attack, or a more audacious character-specific super.
The quirk that I constantly tussled with is that you don’t need to press a button or push forward to move, and the demo was constantly telling me off for doing so. This does put the focus more on braking, drifting, flying and attacking, but it’s still something that I didn’t get used to while playing.
Your Special depends on the character you’re riding as, and there’s obviously a bunch of familiar characters from the Kirby series, including Meta Knight, King Dedede, Cappy, Chef Kawasaki, Starman and more. All of them are given the ability to inhale enemies in this game, absorbing their abilities or shooting out a star, but they have a unique Special, so Meta Knight’s sees him able to really take off and fly, while Chef Kawasaki chucks blobs of damaging gloop. Kirby actually has four different Specials: one for each of the four colour variants you can race as.
There’s more that Kirby Air Ride has to offer than track races in its Air Ride mode, and we went hands on with the returning City Trial mode, shifting across to something much more like a vehicular combat game for up to 16 players online.
City Trial takes place across multiple stages, first taking players to the floating island of Skyah to drive around freely, seeking out power-ups, attacking opponents to damage their machines, and more. You initially start off with a basic machine –the star-shaped jet, a uni-bike, car, and more – and want to race around, passing through power-up icons that can boost the various attributes.
It’s all rather chaotic, as you’d expect, with time ticking down and a need to gather as much as possible, while also denting the progress of your rivals. Each machine can only take so much damage, and while you can restore it, there’s the risk that you’ll lose a bunch of progress if it’s destroyed, and then have to run around on foot searching for a replacement!
It can also make the randomised Field Events a bit of a risk. Do you head in to help destroy the strange stone tower that’s appeared somewhere and risk taking damage from other players? Or do you stay away and do your own thing?
As the timer on this first sessions comes to an end, you get to see how you’ve done in collecting different stat boosts, and then get to choose which finale Stadium stage you want to take part in. These are different mini-game modes, from simple races, to a Dustup Derby, and you want to choose one that will best suit your vehicle’s stats – handily the game suggests what would be a good match. Curiously, this doesn’t keep the full lobby together, breaking you into smaller groups by preference, making that choice more specifically strategic and meaning that you could end up taking on this second part of the game mode on your own.
Having been unfamiliar with the original game, City Trial was something truly unexpected for me when playing Kirby Air Riders. There’s plenty about it that feels like a Smash Bros. style party game – not least the style of the UI – with an initial simplicity and chaotic fun that hides a strategic and skilful depth.
