Shake Kirby Air Riders up in a two-liter bottle and crack it open over my face. A blast of color, speed, and delightful nonsense confront my senses at 200 miles per hour. This is a game in such a rush it will have you craving a dedicated acceleration button—like every other racing game—just so you can choose not to press it.
And under its sugary waterfall of selectable characters, meaningfully different vehicles, distinct game modes, and endless permutations of stat-boosting power-ups, the game tries to seduce you into believing it must be substantial. How could something with this 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 shown off like a slice of Earth itself. “Snickers really satisfies,” they say, and for a moment you might believe it can take the place of a meal.
But it can’t. And we shouldn’t pretend it can. Kirby Air Riders is not deep; it’s candy. Good thing I like candy.
Whether you’re playing the standard race mode, Air Ride, or pinballing through the labyrinthian city of City Trial, the same thing becomes clear almost immediately: this game is an absolute delight in the moment. Rick the Hamster zooms past me like he’s running the most important errands of his life. King Dedede launches himself at enemies like they owe him rent.
Vehicles vary wildly. Some soar through the sky with an ease that feels like cheating. Some never leave the ground and exist solely to plow through anything unlucky enough to be in the way. One machine refuses to turn unless you come to a complete stop and pivot it like a couch wedged in a stairwell with rockets glued to its cushions. You pick a ride, angle your landings, follow another racer’s star trail for a boost. You are making decisions—just not always at the pace the game makes them for you.
Air Ride’s endless forward propulsion means half the race is happening before you can even consciously participate in it. You slam into enemies you didn’t intend to hit, scoop up items you didn’t know existed, and cross the finish line because your momentum got you there five seconds before your intentions did. The tracks don’t present information so much as hurl it at you like a piñata detonating point-blank. Walls, enemies, items, other racers all fizz past faster than your brain can sort them. At times, I have no sense that I’m competing with other racers at all—just running my own little Kirby marathon and hoping the game taps me on the shoulder afterward and says, “Yeah, sure, you did it!”
© Nintendo
City Trial should be the moment all this chaos finally gels into structure. Five minutes in a sprawling city full of crates, pickups, random events, and machines parked like abandoned shopping carts: it sounds like the place where all your choices might finally matter. The mode where the candy bar reveals its hidden protein. In practice, however, I’m mostly just sprinting toward whatever glowing object catches my eye like a foaming-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 the way I once tore open packs of Pokémon cards. I swap vehicles entirely on impulse: Do I want to bulldoze players with a bruiser or sprint around scooping up gold? Some of the best moments happen when I accidentally fly into an item that arms my ride with a bazooka while another player is in view. It all feels impulsive and reactive—less like strategy and more like a string of magnificently sweet accidents.
Then the timer expires, and City Trial’s other half reveals itself.
No matter what I’ve built—speed freak, flight savant, combat gremlin—the final Stadium event always comes down to choosing the challenge that flatters whatever numbers I’ve stumbled into. End up with a flying machine? Pick “soar as far as possible.” Stuck with the brick with a steering wheel? Smash into things. It’s not strategy; it’s choosing the activity that best matches the outfit you accidentally showed up in.
What makes it stranger is that everyone is making this same calculation at the same time. We all wander off into finales tailored to our own careless smoothies of a build. My friend and I can spend five minutes in the same City Trial, diverge into completely different Stadium events, and both walk away clutching first-place trophies like we attended different sporting events at the same festival. The victory is immediately fleeting for any player who forgets to tap the screenshot button.
I say fleeting because the game barely acknowledges any of it. Your character enthusiastically devours the center of the frame while a tiny scoreboard off to the side reveals the truth—another moment swallowed up without a thought, just one more sugar-coated delight Kirby inhales before moving on to the next.
His appetite is insatiable.
Mine is not.
Kirby can swallow moments whole without worrying about what comes after; I start noticing the repetition long before he would. And City Trial, for all its clippable glory, reveals its limits fast. The same sprint toward giant icons, the same bullying of whoever pinballed into my crosshairs. Matches blend together like different colors of M&Ms. If I experience “chaos” the exact same way every run, is it even chaos anymore? No. It’s just candy.
After hours of trying to taste a fire hose of content sprayed into my face, Top Ride is the first mode that politely hands me a plate and asks if I’d like to really appreciate what’s happening. Top Ride looks, at first glance, like the kind of small bonus mode many players might never click on. But in practice, it’s a compelling part of Air Riders.
It reveals that the chaos in the other modes was never incomprehensible. It was just loud. Air Riders throws so much flashy information at you that it tricks you into feeling overwhelmed, even though most of that information is negligible. Top Ride simply pulls the camera back and proves it. With a little distance, everything becomes legible.
© Nintendo
Unlike other modes, in Top Ride you see every racer at once. Cause and effect—usually buried under spectacle—becomes clear. Misjudge a drift and you feel the punishment instantly. Take a cleaner line and you watch yourself gain ground in real time. It still uses the same propulsion-based movement as the rest of Air Riders, but now the information arrives at a pace a human being 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 chaos washing over me.
Road Trip attempts to congeal a sampler platter of the same short Stadium games from the other modes into a single-player roguelike. Every mini-game leads to a stat boost, but in all my runs, the boosts ramped up so evenly that the joy of creating a specific build surrendered to an experience where every number simply climbed at once. The choices don’t give way to branching paths so much as gently funnel toward an eventual victory over CPU opponents that never stood a chance.
Every so often Road Trip rewards players with a treat: a cinematic cutscene featuring production values that far exceed what the mode prepares you for. The sheer melodrama might seduce you into believing the story here is mysterious and chaotic, but it’s really just a simple storybook tale of good versus evil. Charming, fun, and no more than a little treat.
Air Riders also comes bundled with a customization suite that lets players decorate their own machines with decals and silly hats. The most-downloaded creation online briefly included a Warp Star made to look like Chef Kawasaki in a bikini. I downloaded a boxy machine that looked exactly like SpongeBob SquarePants. Delicious.
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Back-of-the-box quote:
“200 miles-per-hour of joyful nonsense!”
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Type of game:
Slapstick combat racer
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Liked:
Wildly different vehicles, Top Ride’s clean simplicity, and the constant sense of motion.
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Disliked:
Strategy dissolving into impulse and a campaign that overstays its welcome.
A single screenshot of someone’s unhinged custom ride can convince you Air Riders “has the sauce,” the drip, the flavor—whatever the current internet word for “I like this” is. But the same shaken-soda-stream intensity that defines Air Riders ensures that every lovingly crafted custom machine becomes a blur the instant the race begins. Characters are tiny. Other players appear for a moment and vanish. I have never once noticed a custom ride in actual play, and I fear my SpongeBob machine reads only as a yellow-ish blur online.
There is undeniable craftsmanship at play here: laughs alongside 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 become the hearty dinner its curated clips or indulgent Nintendo Directs want you to believe it might be. Kirby, the godly creature that he is, can inhale an entire match and waddle straight into the next challenge without once wondering what he just ate. I can enjoy the rush, but I can’t live inside it like him. After an hour or two, the buzz wears off, the repetition settles in, and I’m left wanting something that lets skill accumulate or understanding compound instead of just teaching me to parse the screen more efficiently.
After enough hours with it, I’ve learned to stop waiting for the game to transform into a meal and to simply enjoy the carbonated geyser it actually is.
