Kirby unleashes his Special while riding a custom, leopard-print Vampire Star.
Nintendo/James Mastromarino
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Nintendo/James Mastromarino
Mario Kart World blasted through the finish line this summer. Sonic Racing: Crossworlds rushed up the sales charts this fall. Now, after more than two decades, a sequel to a GameCube classic is launching in time for the holidays. This year been a banner year for such cartoony racing games, but Kirby Air Riders may take the crown with its deep customization and radically simple controls.
The game stays true to the original Air Ride’s minimalism. You accelerate constantly and steer with the left joystick. Hold nearly any other button to brake, which lets you drift through corners and charge up a boost gauge. Release the button once you’re charged to sprint ahead.
Tap a button instead to inhale a nearby enemy. If that enemy has a “copy ability,” you’ll absorb it to sling fireballs, spray ice crystals, shoot out spikes — the list goes on. You can also damage opponents by waggling your joystick to spin into them. Each hit gives you a speed boost.
A devastating clash in City Trial mode.
Nintendo/James Mastromarino
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Nintendo/James Mastromarino
That’s pretty much it! The game extracts a dizzying variety of playstyles out of these basics. Every racer has their own stats and special moves. Machines have unique quirks on top of their own stats. One slides around when you brake. Another zips forward, only changing direction when you charge up. Yet another hops off the ground when you wiggle the joystick to spin.
These varied playstyles serve different purposes throughout the game’s many multiplayer modes. The standard one, Air Ride, comes packed with new and returning courses. The contrasting Top Ride mode cranes the camera up from behind your racer to a bird’s-eye view of the entire track. While this mode is much improved from the 2003 version of Top Ride, it’s still finicky and frustrating.
Finally, there’s City Trial, the game’s best and most inventive mode. In matches that rarely exceed 10 minutes, you’ll cruise around a huge map, snarfing up upgrades and swapping between vehicles before a final showdown that shuffles between races, gladiatorial arenas, high jumps, and more. City Trial can even accommodate up to 16 online players for maximum chaos, and I’m sure it’ll once again dominate my family’s gaming time!
Players secretly vote on a final arena after the City Trial time limit elapses.
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All these modes get remixed in Air Riders’ all-new single-player campaign. This roguelike-esque “Road Trip” extrapolates the stat-hunting of City Trial into bite-sized challenges. You’ll zoom through diverse stages, encountering your choice of obstacles to overcome for stat upgrades, which you’ll need to beat periodic bosses and unravel a bonkers story.
A full Road Trip can take nearly two hours to complete, stringing together dozens of micro-contests that last from several seconds (no joke) to just over a minute. I grew tired of the format by my third time through, but vehicle unlocks and the odd achievement still spattered my brain with the dopamine I craved.
Road Trip has players periodically choose between three challenges, each with its own reward.
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Road Trip mode is ultimately a sideshow. This really is a multiplayer game, boasting the deepest online features of any Nintendo game I’ve seen. I joined a session for reviewers and hung out in a “paddock” between matches — a lobby where I could cycle through emotes and watch the result screens of other party members’ games. It’s also where we flaunted our fits. You earn “Miles” as you play, a currency you’ll spend to costume your racers and bedeck your machines in an eye-melting array of decals, wraps and add-ons.
It’s unsurprising that designer Masahiro Sakurai, who created Super Smash Bros. as well as Kirby, would lavish attention on multiplayer bombast. But these flourishes contrast with the game’s mechanical restraint. Air Riders could have overcomplicated the formula in a thousand different ways. Instead, the game’s elegant core feels as fresh in 2025 as it did in 2003.
