Kirby Air Riders Reviews

Kirby Air Riders realizes the full potential of its predecessor, delivering a chaotic, colourful and vibrant experience that is not only overflowing with enough content to keep you hooked for dozens of hours, but is unique and enjoyable enough to make sure that you don’t question whether the time you’re clocking in is time well spent.

What's really great about Kirby Air Riders is that it gives players a reason to keep playing. Players will naturally earn achievements as they play, and that makes it hard to put down. It's clear that Sakurai fully fleshed out the game he wanted to make in 2003, and the passion he had for Kirby Air Riders really shines through.

Despite its design flaws and City Trial misses, Kirby Air Riders offers enough substance and charm to make it a game you’ll keep coming back to—whether for quick bursts of fun or to teach your friends something new when they come over.

Kirby Air Riders is a fantastic follow-up to a GameCube classic. The racing is deceptively complex with a high skill ceiling.

Kirby Air Riders is an extraordinary racing game that is filled to the brim with content and surprises. It’s deceptively simple to get the hang of and incredibly fun to dive deeper into as you play more and more, with the core gameplay loop even entrancing someone like me, who typically doesn’t get much out of racers. Basically, this is another brilliant Switch 2 title.

“Waddle Doo!” I cheer at the top of my lungs. I just lost an online race in Kirby Air Riders, but I couldn’t be happier. All week, I’ve been trying to unlock Waddle Doo by using a specific item in a specific mode, and have been so unlucky in finding it that this otherwise insignificant race has become a massive achievement. Kirby Air Riders, the latest from beloved game director Masahiro Sakurai, is filled with moments like this. The game overflows with his signature style, making bol...

Kirby Air Riders shakes up the kart racing genre in a massively refreshing way, and has a ridiculous amount of content to explore.

Kirby Air Riders is absurdly challenging to get into. The controls are complicated, and the process of unlocking things is a mess. But when you eventually understand the gameplay mechanics, the sheer amount of content, the thrilling races, and the modes like City Trial and Road Trip, will keep you engaged no matter how long you play. Masahiro Sakurai has done it again!

Playing Kirby Air Riders is like learning a new language – it takes a lot of compromise, and it’s not for everyone. It’s those who master the basics who will soon find many new ways to approach each game mode, providing depth and replayability. If you meet Kirby Air Riders on its own terms, you will be rewarded with a gauntlet that’s bursting with thrills, depth, and charm.

I was one of the biggest Kirby Air Ride fans back in the day, so the fact that we're getting a sequel to the divisive cult classic is a dream come true. Kirby Air Riders is everything I could have ever wanted and more. It's a project filled with love, passion, and a celebration of all things Kirby. From the robust character roster, surprising depth of customization options, and an impressive amount of content to see, do, and unlock, Kirby Air Riders is easily my favorite racing game of the year. It's a triumph from start to finish, and I can't wait to spend countless hours in City Trial and beyond.

While racing is at its core, Kirby Air Riders channels the chaotic energy of Smash Bros. to deliver a deceptively deep one-button gameplay experience - and tops it with absolutely oodles of things to do, see, and unlock.

What is Kirby Air Riders? That’s the question I’ve found myself wrestling with throughout my time with it in the past couple of weeks. Is it a kart racer? Well… kind of. Is it a vehicular combat game? Sure, you could say that. Is it a multiplayer platform, designed almost completely to be played with others? Yes. Definitely. Yet there’s still a nagging feeling that Kirby Air Riders is one of those games that exists purely for its own reasons. As the first non-Smash Bros game to be directed by Masahiro Sakurai in over a decade, it carries an odd weight of expectation, only adding to the strange and slightly off-kilter vibes you’ll find when you check in for Kirby Air Riders.

Kirby Air Riders is an impressive package that makes the most of its deceivingly simple mechanics.

As oddball as the puzzling puffball on the cover, Kirby Air Riders is a spectacular example of twisting preconceived expectations into something weird, wonderful and altogether incredible – inviting you to go fast and kick arse in equal parts.

More racing fun with your favourite pink puffball is here in Kirby Air Riders and it's so enjoyable that my face hurts from smiling so much.

Kirby Air Riders is a robust racing game for the Nintendo Switch 2 and the product of beloved game developer Masahiro Sakurai of Smash Bros. fame. While I do hope Nintendo has plans to add to the overall package with at least some new Air Ride and Top Ride tracks, there is still a wealth of content here for fans to enjoy. If you’re a racing fan or looking for something fresh to play with friends, Kirby Air Riders should be a strong consideration for your Switch 2 library.

The most baffling Nintendo release of recent years, with a quasi-remake of one of the GameCube’s worst games, that seems specifically designed to irritate and confuse would-be players.

More than 20 years after Kirby Air Ride zoomed onto the Nintendo GameCube, the cult classic racing game has gotten a sequel. This time around, Kirby is joined by a plethora of allies and foes for an over-the-top racing experience. Kirby Air Riders takes everything that made the original game fresh and exciting, and dials them up to an 11.

Kirby Air Riders shares a lot of the same DNA as its predecessor, and it's a sequel that belongs in this era. The simplistic controls might not be for everyone, but if you can look past that, you've got a competent racer that does its own thing instead of attempting to battle it out against Mario Kart World.

Kirby Air Riders is weird, wild, and occasionally frustrating, but a total blast if you give into its mayhem.

You want a game that's fast? That pinballs you around and gets to incomprehensible speeds? Go go go go go go. That's Kirby Air Riders. It's Mario Kart on 70 shots of espresso.

Kirby Air Riders feels like a combination of Mario Kart and Super Smash Bros. at their most chaotic. You’ll have to carefully balance battering rival riders while also out-speeding them, all while mastering seemingly simple controls – controls that actually require significant skill to master. The game is vibrant and visually stimulating, and also offers a great line-up of characters and customization tools. But it’s not quite perfect. City Trials can feel anticlimactic on occasion, and I wasn’t quite won over by the story mode or limited set of courses. Still, Kirby Air Riders offers the frenetic multiplayer fun I want from my Nintendo Switch 2, and in the end, makes for a successful oddball racer.

Kirby Air Riders' unconventional controls can get in its own way sometimes, but they don't stop it from being a fun, frantic action racing game with an almost unreal amount of stuff to do.

In that sense, it's a joy to boot up and play from the first minute, as you can even skip the relatively short and comprehensive tutorial if you want. From there, you'll have the option to play one of the game's core modes: Air Ride (core racing), Top Ride (an isometric top-down mode with different courses), City Trial (a battle royale type game set in a big city hub), and a fully-fledged single-player campaign. Including every track from the original game is a thoughtful move, as it allows for a degree of preservation of the GameCube classic, while also allowing players to mix and match all the nuances and benefits from 22 years of developer hindsight.

If you’d listed every possible game and franchise that Nintendo could revive in the year 2025 for the Switch 2, there are dozens of options I would’ve guessed before ever getting to, “Masahiro Sakurai is bringing back Kirby Air Ride.” Clearly, that’s why I’m not one of the visionaries working on the console, because that’s exactly what’s happened.

Kart racing fans have been eating hearty in 2025, with the arrival of the ambitious Mario Kart World and solidly-entertaining Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds, and now they have a chance to end the feast in an unexpected fashion with Kirby Air Riders. Released on the Gamecube back in 2003, the original Kirby Air Ride wasn’t exactly a smash hit, critically or commercially, but series creator Masahiro Sakurai has seen his star rise precipitously thanks to another Smash (Bros.) hit – enough so that he’s managed to make Kirby Air Riders happen after two decades of series dormancy.