Kirby Air Riders Switch 2 Review

A cult classic finally evolves

Kirby Air Riders has a lot to live up to. For years, fans treated Kirby Air Ride’s City Trial as a kind of proto‑Smash Bros sandbox, a place where simple inputs hid surprising depth, strange builds, and endless stories. This Switch 2 sequel doesn’t just revive that idea, it leans into it hard, turning a quirky experiment into a full competitive platform.

If you come in expecting a Mario Kart style track tour with Kirby paint, Kirby Air Riders will throw you. The closest comparison is actually Smash Bros: a flexible ruleset, wild items, a sprawling unlock web, and systems that invite you to tinker until they break in interesting ways. The kart racing shell is still here, but there is a different soul under the hood.

Controls and handling: simple in theory, demanding in practice

At a glance, the control scheme looks almost regressive: machines auto‑accelerate, and you are still using a single Boost Charge button for braking, drifting, and copying abilities. The big change is that the Boost Charge Gauge is now a visible, central resource rather than a background trick.

Drifting is no longer just a binary “charge then release” action. Every machine has a different Boost Gauge curve that determines how fast it fills, how long it stores charge, and how much speed you sacrifice while holding it. The result is a push‑pull rhythm that feels closer to managing meter in a fighting game than feathering a brake in a kart racer.

A heavy bruiser machine like Warhammer Star bleeds speed the moment you touch the button but cashes out in a monster burst that can delete opponents on contact. Featherlight boards like Nimbus Edge barely slow at all, but their Boost Burst is short and demands frame‑tight releases to get value. These micro differences are where Kirby Air Riders starts to separate veterans from casual players.

Coming from Mario Kart, where the core driving model is readable in a single race, Kirby Air Riders initially feels slippery and inconsistent. The physics are more momentum‑driven, and aerial control is significantly expanded. You are constantly thinking about verticality and attack angles instead of optimal racing lines. It is not instantly comfortable, but once it clicks, traditional kart racers feel flat by comparison.

Smash‑like systems, not just a racer

What really pushes Kirby Air Riders into Smash territory is its layered system design. Abilities are no longer throwaway power‑ups; they are mini‑move sets attached to your rider that express differently depending on your machine.

Sword on a compact, grippy machine like Cutter Comet gives you snappy side swipes out of drifts and a charged aerial slash that doubles as a recovery tool. Stick that same ability on a bulky fortress like Iron Fortress and it becomes a slow, terrifying space‑control tool that carves chunks out of the track edge and can literally change driving routes for a few seconds.

Add to that the new Resonance Traits that act like Smash spirits or passive badges. Completing certain challenges or unlocking lore entries lets you equip traits such as:

• Turbo Glider, which weakens ground handling but supercharges your aerial Boost
• Last Stock, which ramps your Boost Gauge build rate when you are in last place
• Copy Master, which cuts ability cooldowns and shifts the meta toward constant aggression

Suddenly, you are not just picking a machine; you are drafting a build. A Kirby main with Fire and Turbo Glider on a mid‑weight flier plays nothing like a Meta Knight with Needle and an armor trait on a grounded bruiser. It is a character builder hidden inside a racing game, and it absolutely rewards players who like to theorycraft.

The unlock web: obsession over checklists

Kirby Air Ride’s checklists have been reborn as the Air Web, and it might be the most quietly brilliant part of the package. Instead of linear progression or random gacha unlocks, you get a hex‑based web of nodes that unlock mode options, machines, cosmetics, Resonance Traits, and even entire track variants.

Every node is tied to a clear condition, usually framed in playful ways. You might need to “Win a City Clash without attacking another player,” “Glide for 20 seconds without landing,” or “Finish a race with your Boost Gauge never dipping below 50%.” Clearing one node reveals its adjacent hexes, so the web slowly flowers outward in a way that mirrors how you are actually learning the game.

Compared to traditional kart racers, where progression often boils down to “earn coins, unlock karts,” Air Riders asks you to change your behavior. The game nudges you toward experimenting with weird machines, sub‑optimal routes, and strange house rules just to see what new challenges appear on the web. It feels much closer to cleaning up Challenges in Smash Ultimate than chasing three‑star cups in Mario Kart.

The flipside is that completionists are looking at hundreds of objectives. On paper that sounds like a grind, but most goals are short, session‑friendly stunts that slot naturally into regular play. It only really starts to drag in the late game, where a few niche requirements push you into very specific lobbies or demand near‑perfect execution in the hardest Stadium events.

Modes: City Trial ascendant, racing along for the ride

Kirby Air Riders falls into the same basic three‑pillar structure as its GameCube ancestor: a traditional race mode, a more chaotic arcade alternative, and a powered up City Trial successor that is the real star of the show.

Hyper Circuit, the standard race mode, is the most familiar piece. You pick a track, pick a machine, and go. The courses are clever and pretty, with multiple vertical layers, hidden air tunnels, and breakable shortcuts that reward players who experiment with angle and momentum instead of just hugging the racing line. But in the context of everything else, this mode feels like the least essential.

The Switch 2 hardware allows for extravagant track spectacle, and the game uses it: collapsing towers that create new flying routes mid‑race, dynamic wind tunnels that change direction lap to lap, and reactive hazards that tie to which abilities players are using. The issue is less the tracks themselves and more that straight racing struggles to compete with how expressive the other modes are. Hyper Circuit is a solid, almost generous baseline, but you will not buy this game for that alone.

Sky Clash, the arcade battle mode, is where things start to open up. Think of it as a hybrid between an arena fighter and a checkpoint race. You dart between floating islands, smashing opponents off platforms and stealing their stat patches while periodically diving into short track segments. Here, the Smash influence is at its loudest: launch angles, invincibility frames, and stage hazards come straight from that lineage, and learning how to juggle a rival just long enough to send them tumbling out of a boost ring is a joy.

And then there is Neo City Trial. This is the pitch that sells the whole package.

Four to sixteen riders drop into a vast, vertically stacked city, each grabbing a junker machine and a starter ability. Timers and event prompts stitch everything together: meteor showers that alter the geometry for a minute, boss raids that temporarily turn everyone cooperative, random air currents that turn previously safe streets into death funnels. Your goal is not simply to hoard stat patches, but to sculpt a build around hints about the final event.

Instead of the old purely random Stadiums, Neo City Trial surfaces a menu of possible finals then teases down the list with “rumors.” Big sponsor billboards flicker with silhouettes of either a drag duel, a survival arena, or a technical race. NPC chatter pipes in through PA systems about “an airborne spectacle” or “a ground pounding clash.” It is never explicit, but attentive players can get a read on whether glide, bulk, or raw top speed will matter.

The result feels less swingy and more strategic than the GameCube version while still fully embracing chaos. You can double down on a read and build the perfect machine for a specific Stadium, or hedge and end up with something merely good for anything. When you guess wrong, it is funny rather than infuriating, because the path that got you there probably involved some of the best emergent moments in the game.

Local multiplayer: the dream realized

Played on a couch with three to seven friends, Kirby Air Riders is devastatingly good. Switch 2’s performance headroom means that Neo City Trial can support up to eight local players in split‑screen at a clean 60 frames per second, with impressively stable frame pacing and readability.

The single‑button core still makes it accessible for anyone who has never touched a Kirby or racing game before. Within a single session, complete newcomers were drifting competently and contributing to the mayhem, while more experienced players pulled off min‑maxed builds and air juggles. Nintendo’s assist options help too; you can toggle on drift timing leniency or a soft auto‑steer that only kicks in near lethal drops.

The Smash influence comes through in how customizable local rules are. You can strip the item pool down to “pure racing,” turn on Stock builds that persist through a three‑race series, or enable sudden death modifiers where the lowest‑placed rider each lap is eliminated on the spot. House rules evolve naturally, and the game backs them up with saveable presets.

The only real blemish on local play is camera readability in eight‑player Neo City Trial. While the engine keeps up, there are moments, particularly in tight indoor sections, where overlapping silhouettes and flashy ability effects make it difficult for newer players to track their rider. The options menu lets you tone down some visual noise, but a more aggressive default clarity mode would have been welcome.

Online play: smart lobby design, shaky foundations

Online is where Kirby Air Riders stumbles hardest. Conceptually, the structure is excellent. There are three main lobby styles: Casual Rooms with rotating modes and generous mid‑session drop‑in, Ranked Circuits that focus on Hyper Circuit and Sky Clash in best‑of‑five sets, and Neo City Clubs that function as semi‑persistent City Trial hubs built around community rulesets.

Casual Rooms are the standout. You can queue solo or as a party, vote on the next mode and track, and stay with the same group for as long as you like. The game hands out Air Web progress and cosmetic unlocks at a healthy pace here, which makes it the ideal place to live if you just want chaos with strangers.

Neo City Clubs are more ambitious. You can join up to five, each with their own rotation of modifiers, track variants, and house rules. One may specialize in low‑gravity aerial chaos, another in no‑item, stat‑patch‑only endurance sessions. The design is clearly inspired by Smash’s arenas layered with something closer to a fighting game’s player lobbies.

The issue is netcode. Switch 2 finally has the power and infrastructure to make rollback‑style solutions viable, but Kirby Air Riders opts for a hybrid delay system that struggles to hide latency spikes. In lower player counts, Ranked Circuits are playable and occasionally excellent. But Neo City Trial with more than ten players starts to feel mushy, with desynced item pickups, rubber‑banding on tight turns, and occasional hard stutters when a global event triggers.

These problems are not constant, and on a strong connection the game sings. Yet for a title whose depth blossoms in long‑term, competitive play, “usually fine” is not enough. When Mario Kart 8 Deluxe’s online is rock solid by comparison, it is hard not to feel frustration at the inconsistency here.

Long‑term depth and meta potential

The crucial question after the honeymoon period is whether Kirby Air Riders has legs. After several weeks of mixed solo, local, and online play, the answer looks like yes.

Part of that is simply the build variety. Between machines, abilities, and Resonance Traits, the combinatorial space is enormous. The game does a good job of surfacing stats and frame data in its in‑game lab, and the training mode is orders of magnitude better than any comparable racer. You can spawn dummies, record ghost builds, and even simulate alternative trait loadouts without leaving the test arena.

What really sells the depth, though, is how much space there is for interaction. Unlike many kart racers, where items mostly function as binary disruptors, Air Riders’ abilities are more about control and expression. You learn specific counters: Ice walls that blunt melee rushdowns, Needle spikes that punish greedy drift lines, Parasol shields that let you tank explosive bursts and keep your angle. The language starts to sound more like a fighting game than a racer, and that is entirely to the game’s credit.

The meta is already coalescing around a few early dominant setups in Ranked Circuits, particularly glide‑focused fliers with Fire or Wheel and gauge‑boosting traits. But the developers have clearly anticipated that; early balance patches have quietly nerfed the most egregious combos while buffing quirky options like sleep‑centric builds that weaponize status effects.

Compared with Mario Kart’s largely static meta where the optimal kart setups are solved and rarely touched, Kirby Air Riders feels alive. It encourages you to keep experimenting because the developers are obviously committed to treating it like a platform rather than a one‑and‑done racer.

Performance and visuals on Switch 2

Technically, Kirby Air Riders is a strong showcase for Nintendo’s new hardware in some areas and merely competent in others. In handheld and docked play, Hyper Circuit and Sky Clash target 60 frames per second and hit that almost all the time. Neo City Trial, particularly in sixteen‑player online lobbies, occasionally dips into the low fifties during extreme city‑wide events, but it is rarely disruptive.

Visuals are where the team approaches but never quite reaches the best of Nintendo’s first‑party output. The art direction is lovely, with soft pastel palettes and chunky, readable silhouettes. Neo City looks like a toybox version of a Smash stage exploded into an open world, filled with playful vignettes and secrets.

However, texture detail and lighting feel a step behind the most striking Switch 2 titles. Material work on machines is a little flat, and long‑distance views can be muddy, particularly in handheld mode. None of this hurts playability, but when Mario Kart 9 and the latest 3D Mario are showing off what the hardware can truly do, Kirby’s outing slots in as “very good” rather than jaw‑dropping.

Load times, at least, are excellent. Neo City Trial sessions roll from lobby to city to Stadium in seconds, and retrying a Hyper Circuit track is essentially instant. That fluidity keeps experimentation painless, which is vital for a game that constantly asks you to try new machines and builds.

Verdict

Kirby Air Riders is not the safe sequel some fans might have expected, and that is precisely why it works. Instead of chasing Mario Kart’s polished but conservative formula, it embraces its lineage as “the weird one,” leaning into Smash‑like systems, a dense unlock web, and modes that privilege expression over clean lap times.

Local multiplayer is revelatory, Neo City Trial is the best it has ever been, and the buildcraft systems give the game genuine long‑term depth. Flaky online netcode and occasionally noisy visuals hold it back from absolute essential status, and straight racing fans may find Hyper Circuit surprisingly overshadowed by the rest of the package.

Even with those caveats, this is the Kirby racer that finally realizes the promise of that oddball GameCube experiment. If you care more about emergent stories, crazy builds, and a meta that will still be evolving months from now than you do about pristine time trials, Kirby Air Riders belongs on your Switch 2.

Score: 9/10