an extraordinary sequel to a nostalgic hit

Like many kids who grew up in the 2000s, I spent my weekends at my friend’s house glued to the GameCube. We changed titles for many players, but the one we spent the most time on was this one Kirby Air ridea quirky racing game from 2003. It wasn’t a staple household game Mario Kart: Double Run!!but rather a quieter game of “If you know, you know.”

We sat on the floor, staring at the huge TV in the living room and completing every box on the game’s achievement checklist. Once we were done, we transferred the save file to my memory card (remember when you could do that!?) and spent many hours playing out different scenarios on various maps in the game, flying around Flight Warp Star and seeing how quickly we could expertly collect Both legendary machines in one round of the City Trial.

for me Kirby Air ride it was a perfect game. It represented innocence, placing me in a time where I had no responsibilities and could just enjoy joyful fun. Kirby Air Riders takes that original fantasy and turns it up to 11, mixing in more chaos to create a flash of nostalgia and fun.

Kirby Air Riders it’s a fast-paced racing game, but it’s nothing like Mario Kart. Your vehicle (called the “machine”) will automatically move forward; you just need to guide it. Pressing A or B will actually force the machine to come to a complete stop, but it will also charge the boost, making it a great way to gain an advantage in tight corners. As you race, you’ll be able to ride the starry tracks of the players in front of you, drain enemies to gain copied abilities (just like in every Kirby game), and take in the sights around several unique tracks, some new to this game and some reworked beauties from the original game.

There’s also a widely ignored game mode called Top Ride, where you race a bird’s eye view of the course, circling smaller race tracks from above. Top Ride is quirky and charming, but it’s the weakest of the game’s offerings – as it was in Kirby Air ride.

Simple races are great, but only if you ask for it Air ride fans, will tell you that the bread and butter of the series is the City Trial mode, which gives you five minutes to run around a small area of ​​the open world, collecting power-ups and finding stronger machines to compete against in a mini-game at the end. Whoever wins this challenge will get all the marbles, but the minigame can focus on a wide range of activities – racing, fighting, even gliding – so you’ll want to create a finely tuned machine that can win it all.

When I played this game as a kid, I used the Shadow Star (which I always called the Batmobile) for everything. I would brutalize it in any game situation and win – not just because I liked the way it looked, but because it was a powerful machine. IN Air Riderseverything has been balanced as Super Smash Bros. creator Masahiro Sakurai intended. The days of terror of the Shadow Star are over. This was quite obvious during limited online playtesting (both the Global Test Ride, which offered a limited version of the City Trial, and a media session hosted by Nintendo), but was further confirmed in the new single-player Road Trip story mode.

In Road Trip, you drive down a path, choosing from three options presented to you (like any good modern video game). Options may vary depending on items and stat bonuses, but you’ll mainly choose different challenges based on the above-mentioned game modes to complete. Every few levels, like Sakurai, there are beautiful cutscenes telling the story of how the vehicles were created, but the narrative mainly takes place in the form of short cutscenes between small challenges.

The early levels were easy enough (even on hard difficulty), but the deeper I got into the campaign, the Shadow Star couldn’t keep up. I had to switch to the more powerful Rex Wheelie for some racing levels or one of the new tank-type machines for those where I had to face multiple enemies. This all makes sense to me, as you can’t create a modern multiplayer game without balancing the options – especially when one of them was clearly dominant in the previous version. Still, I was a little sad to put my Shadow Star on the shelf.

I only knew from the trailers So many things would be changed – hopefully improved – but I still hesitate: will these changes actually be for the better? Or would they make me turn away from the formula I loved so much? I was apprehensive when Sakurai showed off City Trial’s new map, an island called Skyah that brings back elements from the last game’s map. It’s a city with buildings in the center, an underground garage, a small forest, a volcano… It felt like my original home had been replaced, but I can’t emphasize enough how much everything here has been improved. I remember playing this game as a kid and making discoveries by showing my friends a cool area near the forest where there were dioramas of buildings, or how the funicular goes up to the volcano By wall.

This whimsy is reflected in a new map that can change and change every time you play. I literally said, “HUH?” loudly when I’m finding new things or developing better strategies to reach certain areas, and I feel like… well, I’m a kid again. I don’t think I’ll be spending my time roleplaying in free roam like I used to, but I will be using my newfound techniques to gain an advantage over my friends. (Although I was talking about the map during the Global Test Drive with friends and I’ve already heard the phrase: “Oh stayed do it’, so let’s just say the gauntlet will be thrown down once the game actually starts working.)

Everything about this game feels like a carefully considered decision made solely to provide new enjoyment or make it easier to discover through gameplay improvements. A camera quickly zooming in on your character after purchasing a hat, thus dramatically showing a hamster with a weatherstring on its head? Joy. Possibility to change settings, allowing you to adjust the game mode to your own preferences? Improved gameplay. Collecting rubbery versions of vehicles that serve no purpose other than throwing them into the sandbox? Joy. The fact that in City Trial the machines approach you if you don’t have a car, as if they were trying to help you? Hmm, probably both gameplay and fun.

There are plenty of moments where the game gets out of hand – which can be good or bad, depending on how much you enjoy breaking walls. If you spend all your time collecting every power-up you can, by the end of the City Trial your vehicle will likely be unwieldy and will be smashing through every barrier and obstacle in its path at top speed. While this can be great for drag racing and some other stadium challenges, most of them will be much more difficult if your machine handles dog water. This forces you to take a slightly more measured approach – instead of grabbing everything, you need to be smart and not overload your machine.

But this chaos is also what makes it fun. I have footage of me running through characters at light speed as Rick and killing them instantly like that gerbil was on the A train. Boys. If I lose a City Trial because my vehicle is overloaded, that’s okay because I’ll just get in line for the next one and maybe this time I’ll be smart enough not to buy the 15 “top speed” bonus (but I’ll probably do it again). I’ll actually use a magnetic item to massively drain every buff I can, while also hitting my poor rivals to drain their buffs as well.

Taking in the chaos of City Trial is cathartic, like I’m in a Kirby-inspired rage room. I blast through boxes and ruins, annihilating any players unfortunate enough to get in my way. I launch myself out of a volcano, shoot huge laser cannons, and punch giant birds flying from the sky. I throw away bowls of curry that are too spicy for my opponents to handle, so they will hurt themselves when they touch them. I ominously mutter “I’ll get you” quietly to my friend, who is marked on the map because he has the legendary flying machine that I need to complete my set of three. I punch my desk and scream as my friend does the same in response to me.

But that’s another thing – while most of this game is chaotic moments where I grind my teeth and grip the controller so hard I break it in half, there is an entirely different part of the game that is peaceful. I spent an equal amount of time buried in the couch in handheld mode, simply completing races and challenges with specific goals in mind, trying to check off another box on the game’s massive goal list (750 boxes in total!). I spot a challenge box that will reward me with a new character, and I immediately join the queue for a new round in hopes of scoring 80 points in a single Gourmet Race stadium challenge, a mini-game where you have to eat as many photorealistic foods as possible. Yes.

There may be no sound as satisfying as completing a scene Kirby Air Riders and listening to the clicking sound effect of several checkboxes being filled out. The dopamine rush this gives me every time is amazing. Even during a short multiplayer session, as different boxes were checked off after each online battle, it reminded me of sitting and working through a list as a child.

I think so will be I spend many hours opening all the boxes and discovering new secrets with my friends, taking me back to my childhood as if I were a food critic Ego from Ratatouilletaking the first bite of the titular dish. It’s different now. I won’t rush to grab my Shadow Star every time. I’m certainly too old to be sitting on the floor and breaking my neck to look at a TV screen. Luckily Kirby Air Riders it delivers the familiar magic that the original game provided, turning me back into a kid on a lazy Saturday afternoon with friends.