When Nintendo announced that it would hold a second hour-long Direct presentation about Kirby racer Air Riders last month, I wasn't the only person to be more than a little confused. This surprise revival of a one-off GameCube game pitting Kirby against some of his rivals in simply-controlled races and brawls has been getting more airtime than some other huge upcoming Switch 2 games.
Still, if Nintendo's keen to push the game's profile, I wasn't going to turn down the chance to play it ahead of time at the Japanese company's UK HQ this week. Over the course of an hour, I whistled through some tutorials, then played about 25 minutes each of its more straightforward race mode, and its far more involved five-minute battle royale party mode.
Each was a very distinct experience, but I left the session feeling like I might never have played such a full-on game before – and that's saying something. The explosions, booming rubble and war-torn soundscapes of Battlefield 6 might be pretty overwhelming at times, but they didn't make my eyes tired like a single three-minute race around one of Air Riders' circuits.
In races, you control your choice of character on your choice of floating (or rolling) vehicle, with the novelty being that you only really need to worry about a couple of buttons. You accelerate automatically, so it's just a matter of steering and keeping your vehicle level while it's airborne, and then using the B button in a variety of ways.
Sometimes it'll let you do hard braking drifts around corners, powering up a massive boost to accelerate away again. Other times, it'll suck in enemies around you to steal their powers, and activate those powers to hit the other drivers you're competing against.
The sense of speed this whole time is hilarious – as colourful and surprisingly detailed tracks speed by with you likely bouncing around them while getting used to the controls. For a slightly slower pace, at first, the party mode "City Trial" is a good option.
It drops up to 12 players into one big city-themed map, tasking them with taking five minutes to drive around collecting powerups (and robbing their rivals of them with powers and weapons). During this time, bosses and other events can spawn, with the chance for more power-ups if you defeat them.
Once the time is up, you all vote on a minigame (or a few) to play, testing your characters' performance, with advantages and disadvantages according to what you picked up. One game mode saw my air gliding prowess work a treat, since it was skydiving themed, but another time, a straight race around a simple circuit saw me get destroyed thanks to a superb speed stat of 0.
This whole time, I will admit that the controls took some time to get used to. Acceleration can be hilariously quick, making it difficult to move with precision toward a power-up you've spotted, and I didn't find it particularly easy to know what I'd collected, so hectic was the pacing.
Doubtless, more practice would help with this, but I did leave my time with the game feeling like it's quite a novelty offering. Some open weekends that will act as large-scale multiplayer betas in the coming fortnight might help more people to try it, and see if they get more hooked than I did.
I'll be extremely curious, in fact, to see how Kirby Air Riders fares on release. It's the most niche Nintendo first-party game to hit the Switch 2 yet, I'd argue, and from nearly an hour's pla,y I'd be surprised if it found a huge audience. Then again, Nintendo loves nothing more than to spring surprises when it comes to sales numbers.
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