Kirby Air Riders Brings Sakurai's Smash Experience To A Switch 2 Racing Game

Kirby Air Riders Brings Sakurai's Smash Experience To A Switch 2 Racing Game https://ift.tt/RiMCDFs

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.

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