Nintendo's cutest hero finally gets his own game on the GameCube, in a different form than usual though. Kirby's Air Ride is a simplistic racing game, but still with a Kirby twist to it. The simplistic part is that you only need the control stick and the A button to control the game, the Kirby twist is that you can swallow enemies to use their abilities.With Mario Kart and F-Zero already representing Nintendo race game-wise, you probably want to know if Kirby's Air Ride is worth your money. On the surface HAL's second GameCube game seems far too simple to be a good game, but if you give Kirby a swing you'll find it's a fun little game with pretty good multiplayer modes.

 

Graphics:

Kirby's Air ride is not a beautiful game. It was originally announced for the N64, but was cancelled and then announced again for the GameCube. Although it looks better than N64 games, it's not on par with most Cube games. HAL made good use of their graphics engine though; the tracks all have their own distinct look and are very colourful. You'll be racing in surroundings varying from woods to spaceships. There's always a lot of action on the screen, because the tracks are filled with enemies that try to slow you down. This can be a problem in four player split screen mode, the screen sometimes is too full to see every turn in time. There's a good solution for this problem though, it's called LAN. Kirby's Air Ride is the first GameCube game to support LAN multiplayer games. We've seen the option on the screen, but as we only had one copy of Kirby we unfortunately didn't get the chance to test it. All things considered this game may not be the prettiest racer around, but it runs great. You'll get a solid 60 frames per second, even in four player split screen mode. In places the game is pretty fast too. It may not be F-Zero GX, but especially the bits where you glide over rails are quite speedy.

Sound:

The graphics aren't really good, the sound isn't much better unfortunately. The music is funny at first but will probably get on your nerves pretty quickly. The sound effects are nice but there's nothing spectacular. The sounds the power ups and the engines of the different vehicles make nice sounds, but nothing you'll notice after a few hours of play. Besides, this game is best when played with friends, and you'll probably be arguing over the sound a lot anyway.

 

Gameplay:

So sound and graphics aren't great, but that doesn't mean you can't have fun, right? Right, because playing Kirby's Air Ride can be a lot of fun. There's three modes to choose from; Air Ride, Top Ride mode and City Trial mode. Air Ride is a 3D racing mode, Top Ride is a racing mode with a top-down view and City Trial is an item collection and mini-game mode. In the Air Ride and City Trial modes you can choose between different vehicles, most of which you have to unlock first. The vehicles all drive very different, you'll find the standard Kirby warp star is very all-round, the motorbike is fast but steers very slowly, the one that sort of looks like a pink fridge is fast but has no boost after breaking and the weird upside-down pyramid thing is super fast but only allows you to turn while breaking. It's fun to learn to ride all of them and decide which one you'll take for every race.

If you're playing the game alone, the Air Ride mode is the one you'll enjoy the most. In this mode you get to race against three computer controlled players for a few laps. The track design is nice, there often are multiple paths to take, so you have to experiment which path is best for each vehicle.

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The Top Ride mode is probably the mode you'll play the least of all. You race against three other players in top down view on a single-screen track, a bit like Super Off Road on the Super NES. It's a very fast and chaotic mode, best enjoyed with a few friends in multiplayer mode, but it gets boring pretty quickly. The races are short and there are just a few tracks, you'll be able to play every track in this mode in just a few minutes.

 

The City Trial mode is where the real multiplayer fun is to be found. You get a few minutes to collect power-ups and a new vehicle in a big city map. After the time is up, you play a mini-game with the vehicle and the power-ups you collected in the city. The mini-games are short, simple and there are a lot of them. They range from driving one lap of a race to things like smashing up as many enemies as possible or jumping as far as possible. The funny thing is that every mini-game calls for different cars and power-ups, so even if your friend always steals the super fast big motorbike in the city, you can still laugh at him if the jumping mini-game comes up and you still have the standard light star vehicle. The item collecting part in the city can get boring, but you can set the time limit lower to increase the pressure. You can also play any of the mini-games you've unlocked without going through the collecting part first, but it's more fun to get a random mini-game after the collecting.

Playability:

Kirby's control scheme is not complex; in fact, it's probably hard to think up a simpler one. To accelerate you simply do nothing. The control stick steers and 'A' brakes, boost, inhales enemies, uses their abilities and presses buttons on the floor. That sounds like a lot of things to do with just one button, but it all works very easy. You can press and hold 'A' to break, and then release it to get a boost. This makes going through tight turns a lot of fun, you can really practice at taking turns perfectly to get maximum boost. If an enemy is flying near you, 'A' inhales him and gives you his weapon, just like in the old Kirby games. 'A' also still makes you break though, so you have to decide if you want to lose a little speed for a power-up every time. In some places you'll find buttons on the floor, some of them give you a boost while some of them open up shortcuts or traps. Kirby breaks by pushing his vehicle to the ground, so you can use A to press buttons on the floor, again this forces you to choose between keeping your speed and using shortcuts. It won't take you long to get used to the controls, but learning how to use every vehicle in the game effectively will take quite some effort.

 

Lastability:

Kirby is a fun game, but it has problems. There are not enough tracks to keep the game interesting in single player mode. It would've been nice to see different cups with different themes, now we just get 8 tracks in Air Ride mode with an unlockable 9th one. Like in Super Smash Brothers: Melee, there are a lot of extra's to unlock, there are 120 challenges waiting for you in every game mode. They range from simple goals (finish first on every track) to difficult and strange goals (beat exactly 20 enemies with the tornado power-up and finish first), and will keep you busy for quite some time. Just like in Super Smash Brothers: Melee most of the challenges don't give you anything, but a lot of them unlock new vehicles, background songs or colors for Kirby. Unlike in Smash Brothers though, you can read what you have to do to complete the challenges, which makes it a lot more accessible. If you have a couple of friends and extra controllers, the fun will last a lot longer. Especially the City Trail mode has a lot of different mini-games and vehicles to unlock and will probably last the longest of the three modes.

Final Say:

So Kirby's Air Ride is not the greatest game there is, but it's a fun multiplayer racer. It's not as good as either F-Zero or Mario Kart, but comparing Kirby with those games would be like comparing Kirby's old platform games with Super Mario World, in other words: not fair. Like Kirby's old games, its simple fun but it won't last very long. If you want a nice simple multiplayer game that anybody can step into without too much effort, this is a game to consider. Otherwise, you probably want to rent or borrow Kirby's Air Ride before buying it. Give it a chance though; it's not great but its fun.