Kirby Air Ride Review

Kirby, Nintendo's lovable little pink puff, has had an up-and-down career when it comes to the quality of his video games. Some of them, like Kirby Super Star and the Kirby's Dream Land games, have been good if not great, and his recent Nintendo DS offerings haven't been had either. However, his last console adventure game was 2000's Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards for the Nintendo 64, and during the Gamecube era, he was relegated to an appearance in Super Smash Bros. Melee and the absolutely abysmal game reviewed here, Kirby Air Ride.

Kirby Air Ride, I imagine, was intended to be a fun and accessible racing game set in the title character's universe. It wound up being an absolutely boring, trite and pathetically easy exercise in pointlessness. For one thing, each of the vehicles in the game automatically move on their own. You simply use the control stick to steer, and everything else is controlled by the A button. There's not much to do here and little challenge. You have you're basic racing mode (Air Ride), an old-school top-down style racer (Top Ride) and a third mode (City Trial) where you explore a city for a set amount of time, trying to improve your craft of choice in preparation for an unknown event once the clock expires. There is a checklist to complete and a couple of characters to unlock, but no tournaments, no story mode, and ultimately, not much to keep anyone over the age of six entertained for long.

Kirby Air Ride started off life as an N64 game, and as such, it isn't the most graphically impressive game you've ever seen. Thankfully, there are no jaggy textures or anything like that, as was often the case with games from Nintendo's final cart-based system. Nor are the music and sound effects anything to write home about. They're comparable to older Kirby games, but in this case, that isn't a good thing. Considering the technological advances from the old cartridge days to the birth of the Gamecube era, it's a shame a little more effort couldn't have been put into making things a little flashier.

This is a chapter in the Kirby character's history that is best forgotten. It is an absolute bore to play, and with no challenge and little in the way of features, it comes off feeling like shovelware--not the kind of quality product people have come to expect from Nintendo and HAL Laboratory. Considering that Kirby Air Ride was released in 2003 about the same time as F-Zero GX and Mario Kart: Double Dash, it becomes even more appalling that this dumbed-down, paper thin racer stands as Kirby's lone starring role during the Gamecube era, and in fact the last home console game featuring the super-tough pink puff to date. Then again, if this is an example of the quality of work fans can expect, maybe Kirby should just stick to the DS after all.