Kirby Air Riders review: Friendship ended with Mario Kart, now Kirby is my best friend

The best way I can describe Kirby Air Riders is that it is, at its core, an intensely GameCube-coded game.

For some, that might be a turn-off; why would you want to play a game reminiscent of a gimmicky console from 2001?

For others – myself included – a game like Air Riders harks back to an era that may have been a bit quirky and off-kilter, but was nothing if not fun.

Air Riders is a sequel to 2003's Kirby Air Ride, and unsurprisingly, it plays very similarly.

The controls are simple, and while it can be a touch difficult to get used to the way you turn and drift if you're used to games like Mario Kart, within a few races you'll be absolutely flying.

One of the core mechanics is the classic Kirby concept of absorbing enemies to steal their powers.

By absorbing enemies during a race, not only will you get a nifty speed boost, but you'll also get their corresponding ability, letting you blast enemies with balls of fire or slash them with vast sword swipes.

Races are fast, chaotic, and surprisingly tough once you turn the AI difficulty up a few notches.

Before each race, you'll have the chance to choose one of 20 iconic characters, as well as a vehicle, each of which has its own spread of stats and its own unique quirks.

Depending on how you want to play, the combination of rider and vehicle you choose can have some major impacts on your approach to the race.

Meta Knight on the Winged Star may not exactly speed through the more grounded tracks like Floria Fields, but stick him on Airtopia Ruins where his penchant for flying can truly shine and you're golden.

The fact that your approach to the game is so heavily influenced by the vehicles you use means that there's a surprising amount of skill expression, and plenty of flexibility.

Two players can race with entirely opposing strategies and still perform well, as opposed to a game like Mario Kart, in which (at least for the average player) how well you perform is determined by how well you can drift and how lucky you get with item pickups.

There are a few different modes to choose from, each with a slightly different offering.

Air Ride is simply a one-off race; choose your rider and vehicle, choose your track and off you go. Top Ride is essentially the same, but from a top-down perspective instead.

A brand-new mode for Air Riders is Road Trip. One could say that it's Air Riders's closest thing to a story mode, but that would be a bit of a stretch.

Instead, it feels much more like a spin on the Classic Mode from Super Smash Bros., in which you take on a series of challenges, increasing in difficulty as you go, collecting upgrades along the way as you journey to where your vehicle apparently longs to go.

As far as story-adjacent modes go, it's good fun, although after playing it through around one-and-a-half times, I can't say I have much interest in playing through it much more.

Undoubtedly, though, Air Riders's best mode by far is City Trial, a racing-slash-party game collectathon.

Players are given a set amount of time to wheel around the floating island of Skyah, flitting between city, pirate ship, volcano and more, collecting upgrades, exchanging vehicles and smashing up other riders and even a world boss now and again.

At the end of this madcap rush for upgrades, players are then chucked headlong into a minigame, almost reminiscent of a vehicular Mario Party, with each minigame tailored to a particular build.

Again, depending on your choice of rider and vehicle, you will be stellar at some minigames and hopelessly outmatched in others, adding a bit of strategy when it comes to voting for the minigame you want to play – in multiplayer the game does thankfully recommend which option your build is best suited for.

And that brings me onto where Kirby Air Riders truly shines. This is an absolute blast to play in multiplayer.

Single player is great fun as well, don't get me wrong, but when you're thrown into the frenzied melee of City Tour along with 15 other players freewheeling around, smacking each other all over the map, it's hard not to sit there grinning like a child.

Unfortunately, since this is just the review period, my multiplayer experience has been limited to playing online, but I am already excited to head home for Christmas and bust this game out with some friends and just go nuts.

Air Riders is an interesting game. Thinking about it, I'm not convinced that there's a huge amount of replay value on offer here. Once you've run the gauntlet of modes in single player a few times, I can't say I have much desire to play any more of them on my lonesome.

But Air Riders isn't really a traditional racing game – as I've alluded to a few times already, it's much more fitting to think of it as a party game.

When you do that, what you'll find is that Kirby Air Riders is riotously fun, and manages to modernise the GameCube original without losing any of its zany, eccentric charm.

When I sit down solo with my Switch 2 over the next few weeks, this is probably not a game I'm going to boot up.

But when I'm dossing about with friends and looking to just kick back for some ridiculous, rip-roaring multiplayer fun, Kirby Air Riders is going to be very high on my list.

Kirby Air Riders releases on 20th November 2025 for Nintendo Switch 2.

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