Mario Kart is stability — it’s that aunt and uncle who live down the street. You have dinner at their house every week, and know you can call them for anything you might need. But Kirby Air Riders is that bizarre uncle that you only see at holidays, who’s always got some crazy story about when he went to Burning Man, or a souvenir from his trip to Australia. You don’t know him very well, but you always have a good time seeing him.
The original Kirby Air Ride released all the way back in 2003 on the Nintendo GameCube, and we never saw anything else from the “Air Ride” idea, until now. At the same time, it’s been more than two decades since Masahiro Sakurai, the creator of Kirby, has actually made a Kirby game — as he’s been locked in on Super Smash Bros. duty. Kirby Air Riders marks a grand revival of both those things, and it’s a wild and eclectic racer that only Sakurai can make — ridiculously dense and complex, but undeniably engrossing. Although it has a lot of similarities with Mario Kart, I don’t think Kirby Air Riders will have the same kind of mass appeal, though the people who love it are going to really love it. This new game, more than anything, feels like a complete realization of what Sakurai wanted to, but couldn’t, do with the original.
