Kirby Air Riders Isn’t Mario Kart—It’s Super Smash Bros. at Speed

When Nintendo revealed the Switch 2, the one thing nobody saw coming was a sequel to Kirby Air Ride on the GameCube. Though the imperfect lens of time may have endeared some people to the game, it wasn’t exactly beloved upon its release more than 20 years ago. The existence of this new installment, Kirby Air Riders, seemed even more confounding in the context of Mario Kart World‘s presence on the system’s launch day. But Kirby Air Riders is coming this year—on November 20, to be precise—and it’s worth keeping an eye on, after this morning’s 45-minute Nintendo Direct on the title led by its director, Masahiro Sakurai.

Many Nintendo fans know Sakurai as the architect behind the Super Smash Bros. series, but he’s also the father of Kirby, and, apparently, was asked to create a sequel to Air Ride by Nintendo’s software development chief some years back. This seemed to surprise Sakurai, given the similarity to the publisher’s other, enormously popular racing series.

“You might be asking yourself if it’s basically Mario Kart,” Sakurai said at the start of the presentation, which is embedded below. “You race and battle with familiar characters around courses with different features, or so they say. OK, so it basically is like Mario Kart. I even mentioned this when I received the request to make the game.” Isn’t he the best?

Anyway, in broad strokes, yes—they don’t seem too different from one another. But Air Riders’ control scheme and mechanics are fundamentally different. Acceleration happens automatically and, in the original, you really had just two inputs to worry about: the control stick, to steer; and the “Boost Charge” button, which was B on the GameCube pad. This slowed your craft down as you held it, allowing you to drift around tight corners. Upon releasing it, you’d get a burst of speed proportional to the length of time you charged for. Slow in, fast out, as they say.

Air Riders barely complicates this with the addition of a “Special” function, mapped to Y on the Joy-Con. This unleashes an attack that can be triggered after a meter refills. Still, three inputs are pretty light for modern games. Hell, Mario Kart lets you ride walls and grind now by pressing the jump button, which also happens to be the drift button. I appreciate this game’s relative physical simplicity, especially because it still seems quite deep—just in a different way.

In Air Riders, you can mix and match riders and machines, and the differences between those permutations aren’t just reflected in stat bars (though those do exist). Some machines operate in a completely unique way from others. One, for example, cannot Boost Charge; while another comes to a full stop every time it does; and another still continues moving in a straight line when Boost Charging is initiated, but doesn’t drift. Instead, when you let your finger off of B using this vehicle, its tank treads instantly pivot to move in the direction you’re steering.

What intrigues me about Air Riders—on paper, anyway—is that it’s not following the Mario Kart model of tacking things onto what was a simple racing game, encouraging players to exploit the level design so they’re barely ever touching the ground. Instead, the depth here is more inherent to the fundamentals of lateral movement, and how some rider and machine combinations manipulate or completely invert them. Such breadth of vehicle behavior is rare in a racing game, even a kart racer. It makes strategy before the race even more important, which is why, Sakurai says, you choose the track before your character and craft in Air Riders, rather than the other way around.

Oh, and another thing—the track design seems absolutely bonkers. I have played a little of Mario Kart World, and while I had a decent time, it did sort of confirm my fears that the switch to an open world would dull the series’ imaginative courses a bit, which used to be its strength. The environments we saw in this Air Riders Direct, though, seem extremely dynamic and lively by comparison. The Waveflow Waters course, which starts by driving through a parted sea and dives in and out of whirlpools and massive waves, is magnificently chaotic.

There’s also the City Trial, a hybrid sandbox and mini-game mode where players roam around a small map for five minutes in search of building the best possible machine through power-ups, then compete in a range of challenges well beyond basic racing. Those who played the original Air Ride seem to be more excited about this party-style mode than anything else, and it seems perfect for endless, addictive online multiplayer sessions—something that wasn’t possible in the GameCube version.

“Chaotic,” though, is the operative word here. The control scheme in Air Riders may be simple, but plenty can happen on the ground, especially in the more battle-focused modes when players are attacking each other in a frenzy. In these moments, it does remind me a little of Super Smash Bros., in how the speed of play can become overwhelming at times, and you have a limited tool set to navigate the circumstances. Fortunately, there is an option to slow the game speed, which Sakurai recommends for new players learning how everything works.

So, Kirby Air Riders does seem like a pretty singular experience, despite whatever surface similarities it might have to other kart racers. There seems to be plenty here though, and at $70 (hey, at least it’s not $80!), you have to wonder how many people are going to be curious enough to take that plunge. I would if I had a Switch 2, though, which is perhaps more than I’d say for Mario Kart World.

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