admin Shake Kirby Air riders into a two liter bottle and crack it open over my face. An explosion of color, speed and delicious nonsense confronts my senses at 200 miles per hour. This is a game with such a rush that it leaves you longing for a dedicated gear button, just like any other racing game, so you can choose not to press it.
And beneath its sweet cascade of selectable characters, meaningfully different vehicles, different game modes, and endless permutations of statistical power-ups, the game tries to trick you into believing it must be substantial. How can something with so many moving parts not be?
It’s the same confidence you get from a Snickers commercial: all those layers, the caramel stretch, the peanuts tumbling in slow motion, the cross-section of nougat and chocolate rendered as a piece of the earth itself. “Snickers is truly satisfying,” they say, and for a moment you might think it could take the place of a meal.
But that’s not possible. And we shouldn’t pretend that it is. Kirby Air riders is not deep; it’s candy. Luckily I like sweets.
Whether you’re playing the standard racing mode, Air Ride, or pinballing through the labyrinthine city of City Trial, the same thing becomes clear almost immediately: this game is an absolute joy right now. Rick the Hamster zooms past me as if he is doing the most important errands of his life. King Dedede launches himself at enemies as if they owe him rent.
Vehicles vary enormously. Some fly through the air with an ease that feels like cheating. Some never leave the ground and exist solely to plow through anything unlucky enough to be in their way. One machine refuses to turn unless you come to a complete stop and spin it like a couch wedged in a stairwell with rockets glued to the cushions. You choose a ride, target your landings, follow another racer’s star trail for a boost. You make decisions, but not always at the pace the game sets for you.
Air rideThe endless forward propulsion means that half the race happens before you can even consciously participate in it. You crash into enemies you didn’t mean to hit, pick up items you didn’t know existed, and crossed the finish line because your momentum got you there five seconds ahead of your intentions. The songs don’t so much present information as hurl it at you like a piñata that explodes point blank. Walls, enemies, objects and other racers all flash by faster than your brain can sort them. Sometimes I don’t feel like I’m competing with other racers at all. I’m just running my own little Kirby marathon and hoping the game taps me on the shoulder afterwards and says, “Yep, you did it!”
City Trial should be the moment when all this chaos finally gets some structure. Five minutes in a sprawling city full of crates, pickup trucks, random events, and machines parked like abandoned shopping carts: it sounds like the place where all your choices can finally matter. The mode in which the bar reveals its hidden protein. In practice, though, I usually sprint toward the glowing object that catches my attention, like a frothing-mouthed raccoon loose in an arcade.
Every run starts the same way: I spawn, immediately spot some sweet nectar in the form of a giant stat icon, and chase it without a second thought. I crack open crates for upgrades I may or may not need, like I once ripped open packages Pokemon cards. I trade vehicles entirely on impulse: do I want to bulldoze players with a powerhouse or sprint around picking up gold? Some of the best moments happen when I accidentally fly into an item arming my ride with a bazooka while another player is in view. It all feels impulsive and reactive – less like a strategy and more like a series of beautiful accidents.
Then the timer runs out and the other half of City Trial reveals itself.
No matter what I’ve built – speed freak, flight connoisseur, combat gremlin – the final Stadium event always comes down to choosing the challenge that flatters the numbers I’ve encountered. End up with a flying machine? Choose ‘fly as far as possible’. Are you stuck to the rock with a steering wheel? Bump into things. It’s not a strategy; it’s choosing the activity that best matches the outfit you accidentally appeared in.
What makes it stranger is that everyone is making the same calculation at the same time. We all drift towards finals tailored to our own carefree smoothies of a build. My friend and I can spend five minutes in the same City Trial, dive into completely different stadium events, and both walk away with first place in hand, as if we’d attended different sporting events at the same festival. Victory is instantly fleeting for any player who forgets to tap the screenshot button.
I say fleetingly because the game barely acknowledges any of it. Your character enthusiastically devours the center of the frame, while a small scoreboard to the side reveals the truth – another moment gobbled up without thought, another sugar-coated delight that Kirby inhales before moving on to the next.
His appetite is insatiable.
Not mine.
Kirby can swallow moments whole without worrying about what comes next; I start noticing the repetition long before he would. And City Trial, for all its clippable glory, quickly reveals its limits. The same sprint towards giant icons, the same bullying of whoever ended up in my crosshairs. Matches flow together like different colored M&Ms. If I experience “chaos” in exactly the same way every run, is it still chaos? No. It’s just candy.
After hours of trying to taste a firehose of contents sprayed into my face, Top Ride is the first mode to politely hand me a plate and ask if I really want to appreciate what’s happening. At first glance, Top Ride looks like the kind of little bonus mode that many players might never click on. But in practice it is an attractive part of it Air riders.
It shows that the chaos in the other modes was never incomprehensible. It was just loud. Air riders throws so much flashy information at you that you feel overwhelmed, even though most of that information is negligible. Top Ride simply pulls back the camera and proves it. With a little distance everything becomes readable.
Unlike other modes, in Top Ride you see every racer at the same time. Cause and effect – usually hidden under spectacle – become clear. If you misjudge a drive, you feel the punishment immediately. Take a cleaner line and you’ll see yourself gaining ground in real time. It still uses the same propulsion motion as the rest Air ridersbut now the information arrives at a rate that a human can actually process. And with that clarity comes something the rest of the game rarely offers: the feeling that I can learn, improve, and shape the next round through actual decision-making rather than letting chaos wash over me.
Road Trip attempts to mash up a sampler platter of the same short Stadium games from the other modes into a single-player roguelike. Each mini-game leads to a stat boost, but in all my runs the boosts increased so evenly that the fun of creating a specific build gave way to an experience where every number simply increased all at once. The choices don’t so much give way to branching paths as they gently lead to an eventual victory over CPU opponents who never had a chance.
Every now and then, Road Trip rewards players with a treat: a cinematic cutscene with production values that go far beyond what the mode prepares you for. The sheer melodrama might trick you into thinking that the story here is mysterious and chaotic, but it’s really just a simple storybook tale of good versus evil. Charming, fun and nothing more than a little treat.
Air riders also comes with a customization pack that allows players to decorate their own machines with decals and silly hats. The most downloaded creation online briefly featured a Warp Star created look like chef Kawasaki in bikini. I downloaded a boxy machine that looked exactly like SpongeBob SquarePants. Delicious.
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Quote from the back of the box:
“200 miles an hour of joyful nonsense!”
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Type of game:
Slapstick battle racer
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I liked:
Very different vehicles, the pure simplicity of Top Ride and the constant feeling of movement.
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Disliked:
Strategy dissolves into impulse and a campaign that is no longer welcome.
A single screenshot of someone’s out-of-control custom ride might convince you Air riders ‘has the sauce’, the drip, the flavor – whatever the current internet word for ‘I like this’ is. But the same intensity of the shaken soda flow that is decisive Air riders ensures that each lovingly crafted, custom machine becomes a blur once the race starts. Characters are small. Other players appear briefly and disappear. I’ve never noticed a custom ride while playing, and I’m afraid my SpongeBob machine online just reads as a yellowish blur.
There’s undeniable craftsmanship at play: laughing along with Rick the Hamster in a cowboy hat, peaks of excitement when Knuckle Joe lands a knockout uppercut on that winged freak Marx. But Kirby Air riders is not deep. It’s not substantial. It’s never going to be the hearty dinner that the curated clips or self-indulgent Nintendo Directs would have you believe it could be. Kirby, being the godlike being that he is, can inhale an entire match and immediately waddle into the next challenge without once wondering what he just ate. I can enjoy the hustle and bustle, but I can’t live in it like he does. After an hour or two, the buzz fades, the repetition settles in, and I want something that will help me accumulate skills or increase understanding, rather than just teach me to parse the screen more efficiently.
After playing with it for enough hours, I’ve learned to stop waiting for the game to turn into a meal and just enjoy the fizzy geyser that it actually is.
