Kirby Air Riders - Switch 2 Review

Well now, I bet nobody had a sequel to the 2003 GameCube game Kirby Air Ride on their 2025 bingo card! Kirby Air Riders does everything that the original set out to do and looks to expand and improve on every aspect. With legendary Super Smash Bros. Ultimate producer Masahiro Sakurai at the helm (now with 22 additional years of experience) and the help of a much larger team, it begs the question whether this long-awaited sequel was a deserving one or whether it should’ve stayed obscure and buried on the purple lunchbox.

The Good

At a beautiful 60 frames per second, Kirby Air Riders is buttery smooth. The controls are simple on the surface, but as you continue through the tutorial lessons, you’ll see just how deep the rabbit hole goes, with split-second timing becoming so important for maximum efficiency in your races and battles. The difficulty range is very impressive and similar to Super Smash Bros. Ultimate in many ways; the easy modes are perfect for young children and those who are less adept at racing games (or video games in general), but for those looking for a challenge, one could argue that it rivals the classic F-Zero franchise. In fact, it does remind me a little of F-Zero… Perhaps Kirby Air Riders is designed to be a more commercially viable option for those screaming for a new F-Zero entry. I’ll let others debate that, I reckon.

If you’re one for collectibles, unlocking items and just being a bit of a completionist, then Kirby Air Riders has you covered in spades. In typical Sakurai fashion, there’s just so much to do here, from challenge checklists to reward currency and shops where you can buy new gear and cosmetics. According to How Long to Beat at the time of writing, the main story is only two hours long, but for completionists, it goes for a whopping 65 hours! That’s a whole lot of completionist content.

There are plenty of different modes here in Kirby Air Riders: Air Ride, Time Attack, City Trial, Top Ride, Battle, Online - It’s a lot and sometimes you don’t know where to start. But this variety is simply wonderful in Road Trip, an entirely single-player campaign mode that allows you to mix it up with different modes, all wrapped up in a story as deceptively simple (but secretly grandiose) as you’d expect from a plot in a Kirby game. I’ll admit, tutorial Lessons generally aren’t my cup of tea; I prefer learning by doing and getting into the thick of things, and Road Trip allowed me to do this. It’s great that the Lessons are there, especially if I wanted to go back and hone a technique, but I simply loved jumping into Road Trip, as it felt like I was actively achieving something. That and it has stats like an RPG, and I’m a sucker for seeing numbers go up.

TL;DR

• Controls are smooth
• There’s a lot here
• Road Trip is a delightful single-player alternative

The Bad

While the gameplay is certainly smooth and technically sound, there are plenty of superb racing games and Kirby Air Riders just feels… vanilla, in comparison. It’s not bad by any stretch and there are some nice physics going on; it doesn’t quite have the weight that Mario Kart World has or the spring in its step like Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds does. 

Despite the abundance of gameplay modes, it’s still evident that Kirby Air Riders feels very repetitive. The online functionality helps with this to a degree, but at the end of the day, it’s always pick up the most upgrades, beat your competitors around you, etc., etc. This may feel like an odd complaint, as racing games are, by their nature, repetitive, but this is certainly most prevalent in the Road Trip mode, where each challenge takes less than a minute to complete and it all feels like going through the motions, all so you can feast upon the crumbs of story in 30-second snippets.

Kirby Air Ride back on the GameCube didn’t fare too well critically, with most reviewers panning it for a lack of depth and same-y gameplay. While Kirby Air Riders expands on a lot of the original's high notes, the fundamentals appear to be the same, and it’s not really much to write home about. I can only do so many rounds of City Trial or so many races on overly claustrophobic tracks before I’m left thinking, ‘Ok, now what?’.

TL;DR

• A bit vanilla
• Gameplay feels very repetitive
• Suffers from similar foibles that the first did

Final Score: 7/10

Kirby Air Riders attempts to scratch an itch that wasn’t much there in the first place. It’s technically sound and has that Sakurai auteurship that Super Smash Bros. and Kid Icarus: Uprising fans will be familiar with, but that spark doesn’t quite execute itself well enough here. If anything, a lot of it feels a bit shoehorned in. But is it fun? Yeah, absolutely! You’ll have a good time with Kirby Air Riders and with the amount of content here, you’ll be getting your money’s worth, that’s for sure!

Thank you for checking out our Kirby Air Riders Switch review, thank you to Nintendo AU/NZ for providing the review code and thank you to our Patreon Backers for their ongoing support:

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