Kirby Air Riders is the long-awaited sequel to 2003’s Kirby Air Ride. It’s a terrible name for a sequel, but that’s just about the only mistake that Air Riders makes. The original was a classic thanks to doing one thing (City Trial) exceptionally well, and it would have been easy for the sequel to succeed by cuttings its losses on the other modes and doubling down on its strengths. Instead, it took a much riskier approach and tries to make all of the original’s modes worthwhile and to deliver new single player and online offerings at the same time. It could easily have been a disaster, but against all odds, they’ve made Top Down actually fun.
In 2003 AR, Top Down was a mode in which you raced from a top down perspective, almost like watching a toy car race. There wasn’t anything inherently wrong with the idea, but the camera was so zoomed out and races were so chaotic that most of the challenge came from trying to understand what you were looking at rather than from trying to race well. On top of that, the tracks were too simplistic and the mode didn’t integrate at all with the rest of the game, so it felt like throwaway content only included to be able to say the game had three modes. I fully expected that 2025 AR would simply ditch Top Down entirely, but instead it fixes its problems by introducing controllable camera zoom, new and more interesting tracks, and a vastly expanded selection of riders and machines. Top Down is still the game’s weakest mode, but that’s now due to the strength of the rest of AR rather than Top Down just being garbage.
The titular Air Ride mode was always supposed to be the focus of 2003 AR, and it does have its fans, but it largely spent the last two decades firmly in City Trial’s shadow. Air Ride’s original flaws were easy to see after a race or two: Slippery controls, lots of on rails sections, and narrow tracks all combined to create races that felt largely out of the player’s control unless you really took the time to learn the game. Powerful attack abilities and the fact that most courses had a ‘correct’ choice of air ride machine that would stomp all the others further reduced the mode’s accessibility. As a result, it was only ever really used for time trial competitions in dedicated online communities. 2025 AR solves all of these problems by not having them. New air ride machines offer tighter controls for players who don’t like sliding around, new courses are wider and spend less time on rails, and both kinds of new content result in there being more viable approaches to each race. All modes now have extensive settings menus that let you control every detail of the races and racers, but Air Ride benefits most from the ability to add handicaps to individual competitors. If you’re an experienced racer and want to introduce the game to a friend, you can now play with four different levels of handicap to keep the playing field even. You can even set the handicap on CPU racers to create extra difficulty modes in between others. If you can’t beat a level 8 CPU, you can try racing against a level 8 with a level 1 handicap first.
The new modes on offer are online, which I haven’t tried but seems self-explanatory, and the single player Road Trip. Road Trip has you working your way through about 10 zones that consist of a bunch of choices between some combination of three challenges, items, and powerups. Most choices offer only challenges that task you with accomplishing some goal in one of the game’s other modes, like winning a one lap race in Top Down or surviving an event in City Trial, and reward you with a permanent stat increase if you win. Items and powerups give you either immediate stat boosts with some cost or temporary benefits to make the next challenge easier. You’ll also occasionally run into boss fights, new air ride machines, shops, and rest points. Road Trip captures the same stat-building fun that made City Trial work, but the difficulty is a bit of a mess. It already feels too long at the 1.5-2 hours it will take to win a run if you don’t lose any challenges, but raising the difficulty to make challenges more interesting just makes it take even longer. Plus, the main reason to play is to unlock items on the checklist (more on that in a second) and higher difficulties make that take longer as well. It’s worth playing through for the impact the unlocks have on the other modes, but there’s no reason to think about it again after you’ve done two runs to get all the important stuff.
Now, about that checklist I mentioned. Just like in 2003 AR or some of the Super Smash Bros games, 2025 AR has a grid of challenges for each mode where completing a challenge both unlocks some new content and reveals the challenges adjacent to it. Every mode has 150 unique challenges, and while most of them are just stickers or titles you can display on your multiplayer license, this is also how you unlock major content like new tracks, characters, and even some hidden bonuses. 2003 AR’s checklist suffered from having some tedious challenges and not offering much in the way of good rewards, but 2025’s do a great job of both encouraging you to engage with the game in new ways and of keeping you interested with a drip of good rewards. If you just want to power through the important challenges and ignore everything else, the rewards list will show you the silhouettes of the big items and their location on the grid so that you can prioritize them.
After all this, I’ve still barely mentioned City Trial, which is really the biggest testament to how much of a success 2025 AR is. This game is easily worth your time even if you completely ignore its best mode, which I mostly have so far in favor of unlocking content elsewhere. Still, it’s easy to tell that City Trial is as good as it ever was. Just like before, you’re dumped into a large map with a terrible air machine and have to race to collect stat boosts and find a better ride so that you can win a secret final challenge after the timer expires. There are even more random events to shake up the experience now, not to mention new secrets to find throughout the map. You’ll also get new stadium events to wrap up the experience if you’re playing traditionally, but the biggest change is the addition of team mode. Rather than always having to play free for all like in 2003’s City Trial, you can now split the players into two teams and compete in a final event that is determined by total team score. None of these are revolutionary changes, but since City Trial had already held up for over two decades, going “the same, but more” was definitely the right call.
Air Riders is easy to recommend to any fan of the original game. It does everything better and clearly justifies the price tag. If you’re new to air riding, it’s worth checking out if you enjoy innovative racing games and ideally have friends to play with locally. 2025 AR is finally a good single player racing experience, but local co op and competition are what will keep you playing long term. I, for one, have zero desire to boot up Mario Kart World again now that this has arrived.
Conclusion
Rating: 90%
Time to beat: The single player mode will take 3-4 hours to reach the true ending. “Beating” the game outside of that would mean reaching 100% on the checklists, and that’ll take a very long time.
Price: $70
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For more reviews, see my Steam curator page: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/43219041