Kirby Air Riders Reviews
Still, while Kirby Air Riders won’t be remembered in the countdowns of Nintendo’s greatest games, and certainly won’t have the longevity that Sakurai brought to Smash Bros., it’s a fun distraction and the kind of thing that you’ll pick up every six months or so for a quick blast and laugh. And sometimes that’s all a game needs to be.
Open Critic: Whether you fall in love with this game depends on how much the City Trials mode appeals to you and whether you have people to play against locally.
Review in Arabic | Read full review
Kirby Air Riders is a colourful, chaotic and surprisingly tactical racing game that won't be for everyone, but if you like this unusual driving model, you can get stuck into it for hours on end. It works best with family or friends, offering lots of fun and great replayability.
Review in Polish | Read full review
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Review in Italian | Read full review
Kirby Air Riders is a fun and addictive racing game with simple yet deep controls, featuring a variety of game modes, unlockable characters and vehicles, and a charming visual style that, combined with its smooth performance, delivers excitement and adrenaline in every race.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
Kirby Air Riders is so full of variety, hearty challenges, and pure joy that I highly recommend it to anyone who relishes unconventional gaming experiences. Plus, its online component is so well implemented that it may just be my new go-to game for multiplayer fun. ⭐
“The joy of slipstreaming.”
Review in Finnish | Read full review
Kirby Air Riders is a unique concept that's committed to its oddities in the best sort of ways, and, as far as racing games go, the easy-to-pick-up-and-play but hard-to-master mantra is truer here than most games.
Kirby Air Riders might not be the best game in Masahiro Sakurai’s career, especially when compared to his groundbreaking work on Super Smash Bros. Nevertheless, it remains a unique and exceptional title in his extensive portfolio, and a rare arcade-style racing experience in today’s gaming market.
Review in Arabic | Read full review
Kirby Air Riders is unusual, but it’s also brilliant - The controls take a little time to grasp, from the frantic racing to the one‑button input, but once it clicks, you unlock a world of content and hours of fun.
[Kirby Air Riders] ... is a wonderfully fun game that I will keep playing for many hours more, both alone and as a shared experience. An absolute must buy for Switch 2 owners!
Kirby Air Riders is the kind of sequel that feels impossible: a game that completely respects the original’s spirit while expanding it into something bigger, bolder, and more polished. It’s accessible without being shallow, chaotic without being frustrating, and packed with enough content to keep fans playing for months. Whether you love the silliness, the speed, the competition, or the sheer unpredictability, this is easily one of the Switch 2’s standout titles.
Kirby Air Riders es un caos divertidísimo, el regreso por la puerta grande de Masahiro Sakurai a su propia casa, imponiendo sus propias reglas, mientras saborea su venganza.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
Thrilling, inventive, accessible, and supremely fun, Kirby Air Riders is a packed family game that works for everyone.
Kirby Air Riders proves that even after more than twenty years, the franchise still has something new to offer. The game has the potential to become a very interesting alternative to Mario Kart World, especially for players who prefer more aggressive and chaotic races. Nintendo has once again delivered a polished and complete product, packed with unlockable content.
Review in Polish | Read full review
Kirby Air Riders is a dream come true for fans of the original Kirby Air Ride, as well as an excellent party and racing game. It is packed with content, bringing back all the classic game modes and featuring a deep cosmetic customization system for the Air Ride Machines. Additionally, the online mode ensures everyone can enjoy the title to the fullest, the way it was meant to be played—with others.
If you have a Smash Bros. hole in your life and can’t wait for SSB Ultimate’s official successor, you should definitely give Kirby Air Riders. You may just love what you discover.
Like many others I thought we were in for another Mario Kart World fun racer game, when Kirby Air Riders was first announced and also wondered why Nintendo decided to release both games so close together in the Switch 2's launch year. However after the gamescom demo and with each additional hour into the full game it became increasingly clear to me how different the two games are and especially how much depth the Kirby spinoff has. Kirby Air Riders is much more than just another fun racer: the game modes all give their own twist to the game and City Trial in particular offers seemingly endless hours of fun & enjoyment, while the game runs almost perfectly smooth on the console.
Review in German | Read full review
Kirby Air Riders is like a box full of charming toys. There’s a lot to poke your nose into and prod away at, but it’s not long before I realize there just isn’t much to its many offerings. While its sense of polish and variety is impressive, this has come at the devastating cost of focus. You get lots of ideas and gameplay quirks that are individually fun for a while, but seldom do they come together to form something especially satisfying or cohesive. In its attempts to have lots of things that might please everyone, it winds up not doing any one thing all that exceptionally. As a racing game, it’s mechanically shallow and tracks offer little in terms of skill or engagement, often focused on looking nice rather than providing the player with fun challenges that are interesting to revisit. City Trial fares somewhat better, but having only one map whose changes generally aren’t that impactful means it has to fall back on randomness to do anything interesting. Sure, there are things like Roadtrip or Top Ride that are kind of fun in their own right, but again, these are just a collection of distractions rather than anything substantive on their own. I suppose that’s fitting as the final form of an old GameCube that suffered from many of the same issues, but it’s a shame that time didn’t do this format as many favors as I was hoping. I think fans of the original game will like, if not love this, so in that sense I can’t call the game a failure despite my many misgivings with it. It wanted to be a bigger version of Kirby Air Ride, and for better and for worse, it wound up being precisely that.
Sakurai-san fully realizes the vision he sketched out over twenty years ago in the previous chapter for GameCube. Part kart game and part action game, Kirby Air Riders manages to stand out from easy genre comparisons and shine with its overflowing originality. A content-rich package offering countless hours of fun, further enhanced by impeccable technical execution. An unmissable title for many, provided you accept two strict conditions: the chaotic nature (at times truly significant) and the depth scattered among the many (perhaps too many?) facets of gameplay.
Review in Italian | Read full review