Kirby Air Ride Review

 (Originally published to Glitchwave on 2/4/2018)

[Image from glitchwave.com]

Kirby Air Ride

Developer: HAL Laboratory

Publisher: Nintendo

Genre(s): Racing

Platforms: GCN

Release Date: July 11, 2003

The initial reaction to this game by most gaming journalists at the time was a lukewarm one. The one-button control scheme this game offered was scoffed at and ridiculed. They treated it like it was the Gamecube racing game for the sad bastard who thought the difficulty curb of Mario Kart was too difficult. However, I have fond memories of this game as I do with most games I had when I was a kid, so my perception of this game is tinted with the bittersweet dust of nostalgia.

This was Kirby's only game on the cube and it was also his first outing in a racing game. You control various shades of the puffball and ride on a myriad of star machines. Most of the machines were competent vehicles, but some were utter garbage. They tried really hard to make every machine as unique as possible, but some unique crutches of the machines were too much. For a game that relishes a one-button control scheme, the balance wasn't the main selling point. There are about 6 good machines out of 15. There was one-star machine I despised that looked like a purple bar of soap and slipped around like one too. Imagine while you're playing Mario Kart your cart makes a horizontal swerve off the track or swerves you backward. It would piss you off.

There were three gameplay modes with their own unique way of racing and riding these star machines. The first mode involved traditional racing. The race tracks were all unique to one another as well. There was a sand level, a volcano level, a beanstalk level, and even the game's own version of Mario Kart 64's rainbow road. To add an extra layer of Kirby flair, there are familiar enemies you can suck up that have different powers that you can use against the other racers and other enemies on the track. Like the racing machines, some are more useful than others. The plasma power for instance will wreck everyone's shit. The races all had two or three laps and they were all pretty short, but the control scheme worked well in this mode and the tracks all looked pretty good too for the era.

The second mode was another racing mode but from a top-down perspective. This mode is pretty much a highly condensed version of the first mode as all the tracks are shorter top-down versions. All of the machines from the first mode are gone in favor of one machine. This is the mode that I played the least.

The mode that I played the most was the last mode which was city mode. It was a small open-world area with access to any of the machines from the first mode. You could play around on the map for as long as you wanted and sometimes engage in random events like a meteor falling on the map or Dyna Blade would sometimes appear. The city mode was packed with tons of different areas in a relatively small space. It had a volcano, a forest, some sort of futuristic electric pad, tall buildings, and your choice of every star machine/vehicle in the game. I have fond memories of playing this mode as a kid with my dad and brother. We would mostly play in city mode and fight over who would have the hydra or the orange star that flew to the top of the map. We would hunt for the other person and fuck up their star vehicle and some tears we shed over the ordeal, but I think we simultaneously having fun as well.

The sense of achievement by progressing in this game was in the form of literal achievements. Each mode had an achievement board similar to the ones in the Smash Bros. games. You could unlock a bunch of different things like the ability to play as Meta Knight and King Dedede and doing things to get pieces of the OP hydra and dragoon machines. If you were using those two in any race, you were guaranteed to win. These are the only substantial things worth unlocking as everything other achievement is superfluous and used as a shallow way to keep the player playing.

Does this game hold up for me now? Sadly, I think I'm on the fence. The races and city mode are fun for a while, but unlike Mario Kart, you have to have at least one other person to make this game fun. The game journalists of 2003 were right about the simple control scheme, and it's not enough to keep me satisfied several years on. The shining aspects of this game aren't enough to make it a substantial racing experience. Double Dash is just as fun as it was back then and it didn't have to resort to gripping players with achievements to keep them playing.