At first glance, Kirby Air Riders might look like business as usual for Nintendo. The Switch 2 exclusive is ostensibly your typical sequel, throwing a bone to patient fans to a GameCube cult classic. But if you were deep in gaming culture when the original Kirby Air Ride released, then you know that the racing game is more of a risk than it seems. While now regarded by fans as a beloved gem of the era, the racing game was critically panned in 2003 due to its lack of depth and its one-button control scheme.
For Kirby Air Riders to take off, Nintendo will have to pull off a successful U-turn with the series’ legacy. How do you accomplish such a daunting task? Perhaps by not doing very much at all.
Following its dedicated Nintendo Direct this week, I got some hands-on time with Kirby Air Riders at a preview event in New York City. Two traditional races and three rounds of City Trial were enough to reveal a surprisingly defiant sequel. It isn’t trying to reinvent the GameCube classic with loads of new ideas built to address critiques of the era. Instead, it’s doubling down on everything we got in 2003 with minimal tweaks under the hood. It’s a peculiar strategy, but one that might just work if nostalgia proves to be a powerful enough fuel.
I began my demo with a few tutorials to reacquaint myself with the basics and learn a few new tricks. The controls go against every instinct you’ve gained from Mario Kart, as you don’t have to hold a button down to accelerate. Instead, you’re mostly steering your machine left and right, charging boosts with the B button, and wiggling the left control stick to spin attack monsters on the tracks. It took a lot of getting used to in 2003, and it still does in 2025.
After a few tutorials, I learned how to drift around corners by holding the boost button, glide off of jumps by tilting my left stick up and down, and to unleash special attacks with the Y button — arguably the biggest addition to the sequel. (That’s right: The sequel has a second button.) With those tips under my belt, I jumped into a standard three-lap Air Ride on a grassy course. And I absolutely beefed it with a 5th place finish.
Even though Kirby Air Ride has a reputation for being simple, it’s deceptively complicated. That holds true in a sequel that’s even heavier on visual stimuli. The pace is faster, there are tons of enemies to whack, and using a power-up usually results in a massive explosion of color on-screen. Machines swerve around the tracks with loose movement that makes them feel like mechanical bulls at times. The new special attacks add to that mayhem; when using Pink Kirby, I can unleash an enormous flurry of sword slashes that virtually take up the entire screen. It’s a lot.
Though it felt a little overwhelming in my first race, I started to get the hang of it in my second, just in time to appreciate the thrill of it all. The Switch 2’s power is focused on pumping up the spectacle, making courses feel like high-speed rollercoasters rather than scenic joyrides. That was especially apparent in the second course I raced on, a watery track that began with me zigzagging through the narrow opening of a parted sea. The sooner I could get a feel for boost and special management, the faster I could soak in the Rainbow Road-like extravagance of even the most simple tracks.
See, Kirby Air Riders isn’t really a racing game. In fact, Nintendo is using the term “vehicle action game” to describe it. It’s more about delivering a power fantasy on wheels, which makes the traditional Air Ride races second bananas to the much more fleshed-out City Trial. Here, 12 players are dropped onto a map and have five minutes to collect as many stat-boosting power-ups as possible. During that time, they’ll look for machines that better suit their build and hop into some occasional map events that can earn them big boosts. During my three rounds, I was herded to a pop-up arena battle against my rivals, a short drag race, and a clearing filled with boxes for everyone to smash open. After the five minutes are up, it’s off to one final minigame picked from four options that players vote on. Whoever is best equipped to deal with whichever game is drawn has the best odds of winning the whole thing.
In my first round, I didn’t think too hard about strategy. I simply picked up whatever stat boost I could find and jumped from machine to machine, eventually ending up in a paper plane. My final challenge ended up being a test of each player’s gliding ability, testing who could stay in the air the longest after going off a huge jump. I figured that I’d be well equipped for it with my paper machine and high glide stat, but it turned out that I’d also buffed my weight stat a lot during the five minutes. The incongruous build simply wasn’t right for the task and I sank like a lead balloon.
Another round ended in an arena battle where the player who could rack up the most KOs against their rivals would win. I increased my health to the point where it was tough to take me down, but my high speed made it hard for me to aim at my opponents, and my attack stat was simply too low to put a dent in their machines. I didn’t fare much better in my third round, where my fairly balanced stats didn’t give me enough of an edge in a food-collecting minigame that would have benefited from a high turning stat. But this is the fun of City Trial: crafting a build on the fly and experimenting with how it fares in each final minigame.
While the end result can be frustrating if you’re dealt a challenge that doesn’t mesh with your build, the five minutes building up to it are exciting enough to make the time worthwhile. (And even if you wind up with a bum build, rounds are short enough to not feel like a waste.) The one City Trial map featured in Air Riders is compact, but filled with enough nooks and crannies to discover when you’re trying to find stat boosts. I found some go-to routes in my three rounds, including one that took me through a hole in the bottom of a pirate ship, onto a spring that took me to its deck, and into a cannon that would shoot me up into the sky.
Here’s the thing, though: Nothing that I’m describing here is terribly new. City Trial more or less functions as it did in Kirby Air Ride, as do the traditional races. There are more colorful explosions happening on screen, thanks to specials, and your movement speed can approach that of an F-Zero driver if you get enough speed stat boosts in City Trial, but the core game is virtually identical – flaws and all. Even some vehicles and minigames are fundamentally one-to-one recreations of their versions from the original.
I happen to enjoy the original Kirby Air Ride, as messy as I find its movement, and felt that City Trial was ahead of its time as an inventive multiplayer mode. I still feel the same way here, which means that I imagine anyone who found any of it dull in 2003 will also feel the same. It’s a technical improvement and it has an extra button, but creator Masahiro Sakurai isn’t backing down on what made the original stand out (or stand down) from its peers.
In that sense, Kirby Air Riders is a fascinating social experiment for Nintendo. When its predecessor launched, it was an entirely new game that GameCube owners had no preexisting opinions on. That first impression from players back then was unclouded by fandom outside of your usual Nintendo enthusiasm. But Kirby Air Riders is launching in an entirely different context. Its racing format now has genuine fans who love how the original played and have warm nostalgia for it. It has an army of YouTubers who are ready to tell you that critics did the original dirty in 2003 and that it was always an underrated work of genius.
How can a completely different social climate shape the reaction to a game that feels more or less identical to its predecessor so far? I’ll be eager to find out myself come November 20. Kirby Air Riders certainly feels every bit like the eccentric underdog I’ve grown to appreciate over the years, but it’s entering the Nintendo Switch 2’s library confidently disguised as a heavyweight. Whether or not it can hold its own with the likes of Mario Kart World might just depend on how effectively its fans can rewrite history.
