When I watch a great pro match of a fighting game like Marvel vs. Capcom 2 or Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, my reaction is equal parts awe and bafflement. The sheer speed and hyper-kinetic action flies by so quickly that I can only make sense of a percentage of what I’m seeing, and the people who have mastered the chaos must be a different species. Kirby Air Riders is like that: a bubblegum colorful confection of speed, agility, and action that feels overwhelming, but still fun to play.
My hands-on experience at Gamescom started with some tutorials showing the ropes of handling your ride. The ride accelerates automatically, which may seem like it suggests simplicity, but there’s still a lot of finesse and fine control to handling your ride. Nailing a drift around a corner takes precise timing, and when you take a jump you can get a speed boost with a clean landing–which means tilting your racer slightly to land parallel if you’re coming up on a hill. Those mechanics felt approachable and easy to grasp during the limited time of a demo, but had enough depth that the skill ceiling looks high.
This is a sequel to Kirby’s Air Ride, but the shift to Air Riders is a significant one. There’s a particular emphasis on the characters themselves and their unique powers, and this is where I could most keenly sense Masahiro Sakurai’s experience with the Smash Bros. series. It feels like an evolution of that, and bringing that spirit of balancing different power sets into a new racing context.
After the tutorial featured, I played as two different characters: Magalor, the antagonist of Kirby’s Return to Dreamland; and Starman, a recurring Kirby enemy. The riders seem to handle slightly differently, but the major difference is their special moves. Magalor activates a massive beam that shoots behind him, hitting any opponents that are coming up on your tail. By contrast, Starman’s special was not an offensive tool at all. Instead, he could fly into the air on command using your regular spin attack while the special was activated. This seems primarily suited to help reach high places, though in a pinch you could also use it to dodge, at the expense of some speed.
The demo mostly focused on the City Trials mode, which is separated into two parts. First you explore the wide-open hub area gathering power-ups and switching your weak starter vehicle for a better one. There’s a layer of strategy here, as various icons that you collect give you increased defense, weight, boost, and so on. You can use these to compensate for any of your racer’s weaknesses, or make a naturally strong aspect even stronger. Once the first phase is over, everyone’s total power-ups get tallied up and your build gets taken into the second phase. I could imagine that, as players grow more familiar with the game, serious competitive players will start to optimize combinations of racers and air rides with which types of icons they should prioritize for collection.
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The build you craft during this first phase has a huge bearing on how competitive you’ll be in the second one. Once all the players tally up their powers, they’re able to choose one of four game types, and the game will recommend one that’s optimized for your build. Some are more combat-focused while others are centered more on racing. I chose the recommended mode in my first game, a combat/racing fusion with Magalor and held my own decently well. For my second game, I picked one of the modes that was not recommended (mainly in order to stay grouped with the other human players in our closed session) and my unoptimized build showed on the almost pure racing track. Plus, Starman’s vertical-focused power just isn’t the best for a regular race around an oval track, but maybe I just need to get good.
Both phases feel extremely fast, so while one is about prepping a build, they both reward skilled play. And it’s easy to see, even from my limited experience, how choosing your rider, finding your ride, and gathering power-ups could lead to a fierce Kirby Air Riders meta, as advanced Air Riders players explore different options to optimize their competitive edge.
For casual players like myself, Kirby Air Riders looks to be a sweet experience to play with friends, especially in couch co-op, fueling a rowdy party atmosphere. But I suspect that there’s going to be a whole other layer of the game, with the speed and skill of a fighting game, and that one seems destined for the competitive stage.
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