Kirby Air Riders are more like Super Smash Bros.
Blog Andrew Joseph 11 Sep , 2025 0
When I was 13 years old, my father asked me to drive for the first time. It's not on city streets – just in an empty parking lot – but I'll never forget that day I learned that the car would climb forward even if the driver wasn't pressed. Of course, I only walk a few miles per hour, but as a scared, inexperienced driver, my heart was beating and I felt completely out of control. I hit the brakes like a kick drum, start, stop, start and stop until I finally got the handle on the machine. This is a steep learning curve. Before that, my closest experience to real life was Go Karts and Mario Kart, and I naively thought that my hundreds of laps of motion control steering at the Coconut Mall would give me some thoughts on expectations.
Strangely, I often considered this memory a few days ago during my first hands-on demonstration with Kirby Aviation riders. There are definitely a lot of similarities: your character will automatically move forward without pressing any buttons, I am completely off track and heavily relying on the brakes until I have mastered things, and – most notably – my Mario Kart skills are not transferred. But surprisingly, I found it to be my crush brother muscle, but the air rider felt like a weird pseudo-smasher, like the Super Crusher, like Donkey Kong Bananza treated Super Mario Odyssey to another series. Let me explain.
Since Mario Kart World and Kirby Air Riders were officially revealed to Switch 2 in April, many of us are wondering the same thing: “Why did Nintendo release two kart racers in the same year in the same year?” It's a fair question, even the director of the air rider, Kirby himself creator – Sakura poses in his speech last monthjoked that “basically it's like Mario Kart”, and Nintendo asked him to be an air rider a few years ago, he even proposed one.
On the surface, this is a clear comparison. Mario Kart World and Kirby Air Riders have a large lineup of characters that race through colorful courses on various karts/machines as they are a lot of power weapons to try to get first place. It's easy to see why onlookers (even Sakura himself) would question the choice of putting both games in the first six months of Switch 2. But once I got to the air riders, I realized that even in their respective racing modes, Mario Kart World and Air Riders wouldn't race each other at all.
I have to try with Our previewer Leanne Butkovic In the second half of last month, it first crossed the starting track Floria Fields before occupying a stronger flow of water. I was immediately shocked Quickly The air rider is compared to the GameCube original, where the car always feels a little dull. It responds to the jump from Smash 64 to Smash Meee: melee is faster, more competitive, and stacks a lot of new mechanics on the original car, just like the air rider compared to the Air Ride.
The difference is that the melee came out nearly two years later, and the aerial rider arrived more than two Decades After its originality, frankly, seeing Sakura Rie where he left next, creates an iterative sequel and solves the previous problem as if no time has passed. When the Aviation Rider was first teased, I didn't know what to go from the traditional Sakura sequel when I returned to a series a long time ago, and the answer was that it was basically a GameCube game, but better yet, it was a cool direction.
At first, the air rider felt like a roller coaster as I was going around curved turns and then gliding in an exciting setting like a road with rumbled waterfalls on both sides. The strategies of these races have nothing to do with the Mario Kart world, which is about understanding your route on the track, spanning the fingers of the right items at the right time, and performing shortcuts when you find the power you want. The air riders are more about attacking and reacting to your opponents – Nintendo even opened up the media’s behind-the-spoke speech by calling it a “vehicle action game” rather than a kart racer. To successfully play the air rider, I need to focus on combat and opponent positions while also charging my devastating special things by attacking enemies and following the exact path of the leader to take advantage of the new stellar sliding capabilities that will increase your speed as you collect the traces of the star machine. Once I was centered around these core mechanics, I began to understand that from a gaming perspective, Mario Kart World is not a direct comparison point for Kirby Aviation riders: this is another dear Super Smash Brother of Sakura.
Smash is technically classified as a fighting game, but it does get rid of opponents as a premium platform and instead of exhausting the health bar, it can apply the same concept to Kirby Aviation riders. Smash and Air riders are both found in the suburbs of traditional genres, causing the game to be scary at first glance, but offers a shocking mechanical depth to those who invest heavily in the system. Like I said, I felt very overwhelmed in my first aerial rider race, but determined to understand the complexity of it, and I went back to the three times of the presentation during my Pax West, each time gradually getting better and more confident. I remembered my first eight games in Super Smash Bros. For the Wii U, it's too thrilling, chaotic and hard to follow, and I think it's a pattern I'm attached to. But Sakura Games has a way to attract you, and soon after, the eight-game matches become a staple on game nights with friends.
I can see the same thing happening with Air Rider’s urban trial mode, and I now have the chance to hit eight times. GameCube original This Returned Fan Favorite brings you into an open city with up to 15 players, allowing you to find better rides and upgrade machines in five minutes and generates statistics and motivation throughout the map. At the end of the five minutes, you have a series of competitions with developed machines, from seeing who can glide to the farthest speed test to straightforward tests of drag races.
Although Sakurai warned it in his speech, I spent my first city trial run, swallowing up all the electricity I could find, which led to a machine being too fast for the subsequent mini-game. I was completely out of track and initially I was punished for being too greedy in the city trial. But for the subsequent runs, I started to choose more about what power I grabbed and what electricity I left behind, trying to make the machine perfect for any mini-game that could appear.
Sakurai's fingerprints are indeed all over the air riders. From the sleek menu and UI design traditionally designed by his wife Michiko Sakurai to dramatic, slow motion, red and black finish zooms, it can interrupt the machine that destroys opponents, just like a Ultimate final knockout match. Even the basic black title on the main menu is the same as the Ultimate on a white background, and Aerial rider's Japanese website It's easy to browse the other series with Sakura, and comes with character renderings and alternative costume designs that scream the smash brothers. The unique special move of each character immediately reminds me of the final smash, and every aspect of my presentation is very obvious abandoning Polish and attention to detail.
I was interested in seeing how the public perceived aerial riders in a few months. It's a little more subtle difference than it looks, so I don't think the Aviation Knight's demo for the first time people play is great. I spent about two hours watching a demo of it on Pax West, and the player atmosphere felt very familiar during my first hands-on training: overly thrilling, overwhelmed, and generally confused. The air rider presents himself as a cute, simple, approachable racer, using only the control stick and a few buttons, but in reality, it's an in-depth and complex action game that requires all your attention. This tough, paradoxical first impression, coupled with the surface level comparison with Mario Kart and the huge $70 price of the air rider, makes me worry that people won't be in the day when they launch in November. I hope not, because after meeting the aerial rider on my own terms and working on several demo sessions to learn about it, I was so excited for the fascinating sequel to one of my favorite creators.
Logan Plant is the database manager and host of playlist editor for Nintendo Voice Chat and IGN. The Legend of Zelda is his favorite video game franchise of all time, and he patiently waits for Nintendo to announce the brand new F-Zero. You can find him online @LoganJplant.