Kirby Air Riders review for Nintendo Switch 2

I probably shouldn’t admit this, but I’ve never been able to get into Smash Bros. I’ve tried many times, but as someone who doesn’t love multiplayer games very much, I’ve always felt kind of indifferent towards it. I get why others like it, but it’s not for me.

I get the same kind of feeling from Kirby Air Riders. I suspect that if you’re a certain kind of gamer – that is, one who loves Smash Bros. – it’ll be your new favourite game, but if you’re not, you may feel kind of like I do towards it: it clearly has plenty of good qualities, but as a package, it’s not something I’d actively seek out.

It’s probably not a coincidence that Kirby Air Riders’ principal architect is Masahiro Sakurai, who created Smash Bros (and, as a side note, Kirby), and whose last game was Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Even if that’s a fighting game and Kirby Air Riders is a racing game, the two still manage to have a lot in common.

The biggest thing: Kirby Air Riders is designed for fast-paced, short matches, preferably played against other people. Even if there’s a pretty significant amount of single-player content in the Road Trip mode, everything else here – the top-down Top Ride, the free-for-all of City Trial, the titular Air Rides – was clearly designed to push players towards online play, against other players. While Road Trip does a good job of showing off all the different modes Kirby Air Riders has to offer, everything feels like it’s over in a matter of seconds, so you never really get to sink your teeth into any of them.

At the same time, though, there’s no small amount of irony in the fact that the races tend to be so short, since Kirby Air Riders’ gameplay is actually pretty demanding. Unlike, say, Mario Kart, where you can pick it up, figure it out, and play it quickly, you need to play the tutorial first to have any idea of what you’re doing. Even if the gameplay seems simple – I mean, it’s a racer where your vehicle moves forward on its own accord, so you really just need to steer and to shoot – it still finds a way to be a lot tougher than it looks at first glance.

Which is to say: it’s a lot more Smash Bros than Mario Kart. If you plop someone down like me in front of those games, I’ll gravitate to the latter, and feel like the former is just mashing buttons – even if I know there’s depth that I’m just not getting. I feel the same way about Kirby Air Rider: anyone can pick it up and play, but if you really want to get the most out of it, you’ll need to be much more attentive, not to mention willing to play with other people. So if you have a Smash Bros. hole in your life and can’t wait for SSB Ultimate’s official successor, you should definitely give Kirby Air Riders. You may just love what you discover.

Nintendo provided us with a Kirby Air Riders Nintendo Switch 2 code for review purposes.