Mario Kart World—as in, not the millionth expansion for Mario Kart 8, but an actual, brand new Mario Kart game—and Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds were already enough to cement 2025's status as a fantastic year for racing games. To get Kirby Air Riders (KAR)—the long-awaited sequel to the widely beloved Kirby Air Ride on GameCube—during the same year is just icing on the cartoonishly large, pink, and strawberry-adorned cake that Kirby has already finished eating by the time you're done reading this (admittedly long) sentence.

KAR is, more or less, exactly what it looks like: A racing game, but with a coat of Kirby-pink paint. If I had to describe this game in one word, for better or for worse, it's FAST. As in bold, all-caps, FAST. Or at least, it feels fast—mercilessly so. If there were fewer walls and barriers in this game, it definitely feels like it easily could've been an F-Zero-esque affair where it's all too easy to speedily fall to your doom at every sharp turn. And yet, despite how fast the game feels, if you actually look at the speeds in the bottom right corner, more often than not, you're actually not too far outside of the realm of what you'd drive in a school zone, and personally, I love that.

Despite the somewhat-simultaneously-fast-and-slow speeds, the gameplay is smooth, simple, and mostly intuitive. For players who want something they can really sink their teeth into, there's a lot of mechanical depth to be found in KAR, and yet for players who don't want to get too into the weeds, that depth isn't so important that understanding it is necessary. For added fun, the same can be said about the visual customization options in this game. In other words, KAR lends itself to playstyles and levels of all types, meaning it's really easy to just jump into KAR, regardless of your skill level or what you want to do.

On the topic of things to do, there are four main modes in KAR: Road trip, city trial, air ride, and top ride. Each one, in turn, also has several mini-games that you can also do, which usually boil down to being something along the lines of racing or winning a fight. Still, they're creative, and really flex the love and creativity that this game is just bursting at the seams with. Personally, my favorite mini game is Gourmet Race—where you just try to eat as much food as possible—because it's cute, quintessentially Kirby, and I like the PNGs of realistic foods in this otherwise very cartoony game.

Speaking of, you might not expect it from a game with characters that look as simple as those of Kirby, but the visuals—the environments in particular—are astonishingly rich. They're beautifully designed, colorful, detailed—it's a shame you can't let your eyes linger on them for too long, lest you risk getting passed, because they're absolutely gorgeous. The music, similarly (and unsurprisingly), is excellent—catchy, bouncy, energetic, distinct, and everything you'd want and expect in a Kirby game.

Getting back to the gameplay modes, road trip is basically the story mode. You progress by way of various challenges and boss “fights.” I put “fights” in quotation marks, because they're not always necessarily battles—in fact, it's not unusual for it to be a race, or something else along those lines. The story itself, however, is nothing terribly special or memorable. City trial is the unbridled chaos mode where you and other players/CPUs spend some time traversing a map and gathering power-ups and different vehicles, only to face off in a showdown (some kind of mini game) afterward—personally, this is my favorite of the bunch. Air ride is exactly what it sounds like—this is the mode where you just race to your heart's content. Finally, top ride is a mode where you race from a top-down perspective. It's difficult to get used to, and frankly, I don't care for it for that reason.

On a more positive note, I was pleasantly surprised that the accessibility options on this game were so robust. Among others, there are color filters, the ability to add outlines, adjustable fields of view, turning visual effects from speed off, and way, Way, WAY more. The only nitpick I have here is that while I like that there's an option to make the text bigger, I wish it were even bigger—even if only a little—still. Even so, the breadth of options the game currently has available is fantastic and deserves acknowledgment. I can only hope this level of detail in accessibility options becomes the new norm, not just for Nintendo, but also for games as a whole.

Where this game falls short, however, is in the unlockables. Like plenty of other Masahiro Sakurai-helmed games, KAR has a love of letting the player unlock content. On one hand, something is refreshing about a new game that requires you to unlock a bunch of the fun stuff the old-fashioned way—by, you know, actually playing it, as opposed to just being able to buy everything with real money right off the bat. But on the other hand, this game gives you so profoundly little at its start and has so many unlockables that the fact that you have to manually unlock just about every little thing (“just about” because there are several items that can be bought with in-game money) goes from being cute and perhaps a bit nostalgic, to tedious and annoying really fast. The number of characters available and customization options, in this way, end up being just as much of a curse as they are a blessing. The good news is that many things—including a few of the playable characters—are unlocked pretty easily. But that silver lining loses its luster real fast when you realize the sheer volume of things to be unlocked.

It's at this point, I realize that I can't avoid talking about the elephant-eared Kirby in the room any longer. Forgive me, readers, for I have sinned. I have a confession to make: I've played so little of Kirby Air Ride on GameCube, and my memory of it is so fuzzy, that I may as well have not played any at all. There wasn't a particular reason for me avoiding it—I think Kirby is really cute—but if I had to guess, it probably had a lot to do with how my itch for a good racing game was being very thoroughly scratched at the time by Mario Kart Double Dash aka “the best Mario Kart game to this day and I'm willing to die on this (DK) mountain.”

My point by saying all that being that, alas, I can't speak firsthand to how KAR compares to its GameCube predecessor. But because I can't tell you that, I can instead assuredly say that you don't need nostalgia for Kirby Air Ride to enjoy this game. As a standalone experience, KAR is a delight, and a standout even in an exceptionally great year for racing games.