Kirby Air Riders

Platform: Nintendo Switch 2

A colourful cartoon racer filled with Nintendo characters — what is this, Mario Kart? Almost amazingly, no: despite surface similarities, Kirby Air Riders is far more than a reskin of the plumber's speedy side hustle, it's a delightfully weird, borderline esoteric take on the genre that packs surprises around every sharply-taken corner.

Some background — Kirby Air Riders is a follow-up to the largely forgotten Kirby Air Ride, originally released on the GameCube back in 2003. A whopping 22 years between entries might mark this as little more than an exercise in trademark extension, but it's actually more of a passion project for director Masahiro Sakurai. If that name rings a bell, that's because he's also the director of the decidedly less-niche Super Smash Bros series, and it's that series, rather than Mario Kart, that most seems to influence this long-delayed sequel.

Forget lobbing a blue shell at rivals – here, you can slash swords or fling fireballs mid-lap.

Just as Smash Bros eschews how fighting games are "supposed" to work, Kirby Air Riders ignores all the rules of kart racers. Chiefly, there's no accelerate — the machines that the 21 playable characters ride around on constantly move forwards of their own accord — while the brake function is used to take corners or charge up bursts of zoom to try to overtake rivals. That's right: you have to slow down to speed up.

Then there's the fact that all of the racing machines — created by an ancient superintelligence and symbiotically bonded to their Rider in the game's bonkers story mode, of course –—are hover vehicles, meaning you'll have to account for uplift, drag, and landing orientation when taking ramps. Races also have more of a combat element to them. All of the racers can use Kirby's signature Copy ability, allowing them to take on skills from enemies scattered around tracks. Forget lobbing a blue shell at rivals — here, you can slash swords or fling fireballs mid-lap. It's all brilliantly weird, but in a way that makes this really stand out from the glut of kart racing klones.

Air Riders has far more than just straight races, though — not that these are straight races to begin with — thanks to a plethora of modes to experiment with, each offering fun (or borderline deranged) twists on the formula. City Trial is a sort of battle royale where players zoom around an open map gobbling up power-ups (and trying to stop your rivals from gathering more than you), before being thrown into a randomised mini game. There's a truly chaotic element to this, since you have no idea what that final challenge will be, so you may end up with a bunch of upgrades that are useless for the task at hand, but the surprise is part of the fun. Elsewhere, Top Ride takes the "regular" races and presents them from a top-down perspective, which can really mess with any spatial awareness you've developed for the game, while Road Trip serves as the story mode, mixing races and minigames but in a sort of branching narrative peppered with unexpectedly detailed cinematic cutscenes.

Another clear link to Sakurai's Smash Bros design ethos is the way Air Riders constantly rewards players. Practically every interaction with the game seems to unlock something — even booting it up for the first time delivers a milestone achievement — which makes for a steady drip-feed of rewards. However, like Smash, it can also feel a bit like you're being a bit led on with seemingly hundreds of cosmetic quirks or minor unlocks to chase, many of which are ultimately inconsequential. The components that do matter, though — new racers, new machines, all of which have different stats, the various abilities you can chase and learn to master — make Air Riders deceptively strategic, and offer far greater depth than its sugar-coated appearance would indicate.

Kirby Air Riders might ultimately be a bit too weird for its own good in places, but for anyone who connects with its experimental approach, it'll sink its claws in deep, dragging you back for daily challenges or just to get that little serotonin boost of unlocking one of its litany of micro-rewards. A racer that's not really a racer, with plenty of gaming DNA from a fighter that isn't a conventional fighter, there's literally nothing else like it.