Kirby Air Riders hands-on preview – Nintendo’s most inexplicable sequel

A sequel to one of the worst reviewed Nintendo titles of all time is somehow also a launch window game for the Switch 2.

We’re not going to lie, we’re beginning to worry about the decision-making process at Nintendo, when it comes to the Switch 2. Headliner games like Mario Kart World and Donkey Kong Bananza have been great but the lower budget titles, which Nintendo often use to explore more experimental ideas and niche franchises, have been decidedly disappointing so far.

Welcome Tour was horribly unappealing and Drag x Drive is so thin a concept you begin to tire of it before the tutorial is over. We once described Everybody 1-2-Switch as the least wanted Nintendo sequel of all time and that’s probably still true, but Kirby Air Riders is running it a close second.

In the wake of Welcome Tour’s release we took a look at the eight worst reviewed Nintendo games on Metacritic and sitting just outside that list was… Kirby Air Ride on the GameCube. The 2003 original was an incredibly lightweight racing game, of the sort that makes Mario Kart look like Gran Turismo, and yet, for no readily apparent reason, it’s back on Switch 2.

The original game was directed by Masahiro Sakurai, now better known for the Super Smash Bros. series. It was quickly forgotten at the time, but its revival now is utterly bizarre, given that the Switch 2 already has a family friendly racing game, in Mario Kart World, and it makes absolutely no sense to add another at this point.

It’s especially peculiar because Sakurai’s Kid Icarus: Uprising is currently languishing away as a 3DS exclusive: a great game brought low by awful controls, that would be the perfect thing to remaster as a smaller Christmas release for the Switch 2. Sakurai claims that Air Riders was actually Nintendo’s idea, but what gets us is that not only is it an unwanted follow-up to an unloved game but from what we played at Gamescom it feels more like a remake than an actual sequel.

Despite a 45 minute Nintendo Direct this week, there were no new game modes announced that weren’t in the original game, which seems incredible given how bare bones the GameCube title was. We played Air Riders for 30 minutes at Gamescom, starting with some tutorials explaining the fact that you don’t actually have to press accelerate in the game – you’re always moving forward – and all you have to worry about is drifting, boosting, and attacking.

The original game famously (well, semi-famously) only used one button but the sequel has a few more and we can’t help feeling that even though it’s presumably meant to be even easier to play than Mario Kart it’s actually very confusing at first, with an intrinsically odd premise and weird, fiddly controls (we kept getting the spin attack, which you perform by waggling the left stick, wrong).

Kirby’s signature ability to suck up enemies and steal their powers is in the game, and can be used by whatever of the dozen or so characters you play as (there were only three in the original), but it wasn’t very prominent in anything we played and we kept forgetting we could do it.

The standard race mode is Air Ride but most of our time was spent in City Trial mode, which is probably what the original was most famous for. The idea is that you and the other players (we were playing against fellow journos) are dropped into a relatively large open area, filled with buildings, underground areas, and various shortcuts – including portals.

You’re not racing anyone though, but instead competing to collect as many stat-enhancing icons to improve the ability of the vehicle you’re driving; including attacking other players to steal their icons and lower their stats. You have five minutes to do this, as well as swap vehicles (the one you start off with is purposefully useless), and then you’re flung into an extremely short minigame.

In the original the minigame was chosen at random, which was hugely annoying because there was no way to know which stat upgrades might be most useful for it. In the sequel you’re allowed to vote on one of four minigames but that’s really no better, as you could’ve been collecting a bunch of speed icons, for example, and then end up playing a minigame where that’s not an advantage at all.

For the record, the ones we played included a straight race, that looked a bit like a straightened out Rainbow Road and lasted maybe a minute. The other was essentially Monkey Target, from Super Monkey Ball, except without any of the charm or interesting presentation, as you speed off a ramp and try and glide as far as possible (you can tilt your vehicle up and down to extend your air time, and to get a boost when you land).

None of this was in the least bit entertaining. If you keep picking up speed icons, which seemed an obvious thing to do the first time round, you tear round the world at such speed it’s almost nauseating. Especially as you can’t slow down but instead have to use the drift button to switch into a kind of bullet time and try and point yourself in the direction you want to go.

We assume there’s at least one more game mode yet to be announced, perhaps even one that’s brand new, but if it’s a major improvement on City Trial then the most puzzling thing about Air Riders will be why they didn’t show that first.

Maybe if these were the twilight years of the Switch 2 this would make sense as a release but as something set to appear within the first five months of the console’s launch it seems pure folly. Nintendo is a company known for making strange decisions, many of which turn out to be acts of unexpected genius, but it’s very hard to imagine Kirby Air Riders will be one of those.

Formats: Nintendo Switch 2
Price: £58.99
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Sora Ltd. and Bandai Namco Studios
Release Date: 20th November 2025
Age Rating: 7

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