When Nintendo brings out a big new exclusive for the Switch 2, you'd normally be able to fairly safely assume it'll sell at least a few million copies. While its lineup of franchises does offer stronger or weaker entries occasionally, there's generally a reliable mass-appeal angle to many of its releases.
At least, that's what I would have said before getting my hands on Kirby Air Riders, which is probably the most confusing Nintendo exclusive I've played in years. This frenetic racing game is almost overwhelmingly high-octane, and relaunches a Kirby sub-genre that only ever got a single entry back in the GameCube days.
There are a few modes to get into. The simplest sees you take part in races against other characters, drifting around corners and taking any opportunity to inhale NPC characters to gain powers and slow down your opponents. This is the most intelligible the game gets, but its pace is still wild, with the speed you get up to becoming insane almost immediately, and the tight corners of the tracks making themselves sometimes impossible to manage.
Another mode, City Trial, sees you given five minutes to explore a dense (but unchanging and sole) map, collecting power-ups and ability points at the same time as your competitors. Sometimes random events will draw you all together, and you can also damage each other during this time, but once it's up, you'll each vote on a single minigame to see who prepared the best rider.
I was amazed to learn that it was only one minigame per round, rather than a gauntlet, though, so you can easily find that you built a specialised machine completely unsuited to the game others vote in.
Finally, there's Road Trip, a sort of story mode that gives you a grounding in all the races and minigames by offering you a long list of them to play through before eventually (after a good couple of hours) playing a final boss.
The story beats meted out in this time are wild, but the mode became outright boring on Normal difficulty almost immediately due to the lack of actual challenge, and it's quite a slog to get through. The idea that I'd do so again to see the regions I chose not to travel to doesn't really appeal.
It's not that Air Riders races aren't fun – they are. The fun, though, is so shotgun in its approach, and the speed of gameplay gets so amped up, that I just can't see someone devoting more than a few hours to it, even in a party setting. It's all more fun and frantic in splitscreen, but I'm not sure it offers enough that Mario Kart World can't beat.
I'm under no illusions that there's a core of gamers who loved Air Ride back in 2003, and who've longed for a sequel ever since. For those people, this is like a gift from the heavens, giving them something they didn't really have any realistic right to expect.
For the rest of us, it's about the oddest first-party game that Nintendo has released in a long, long time, and I'm extremely curious to see how many people are tempted into picking it up.
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