Mr Viral
Image: NintendoRight, it’s been out a week now, so it seems like enough time should have passed that we can start having a little chat about Kirby Air Riders, and in particular its stellar City Trial mode.
“Stellar? It’s a chaotic mess!” Indeed it is, and well met, my friend. However, that’s exactly why it’s so damn good, so stop shouting at me.
Also, it’s only a mess when you don’t know what you’re doing. That’s right, and as I tried to impress in my 8/10 review, once you know what you’re doing in Kirby Air Riders, and once you take that knowledge with you into the online realm…well, it’s a surprisingly strategic thing. There’s a way to play well and a way to play badly, and luck doesn’t come into it nearly as much as Mario Kart, with its back-of-the-pack power-up boosts and blue shell upsets.
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Nope. If you know the score in City Trials, as is the case with any race on any track in this game, you’ll reap the rewards directly, and so being able to quickly grab the best power-ups (that’s all those ludicrously massive icons that littler the arena) alongside a proper knowledge of the fastest routes, most protected avenues, secret areas, and all that jazz, will make you a winner. Oh, wonderful skill-based racing with a high-skill ceiling – you were hiding in there all along.
So. Given that I’m rightly enamoured with the air riding here, and given that I’ve been so impressed by a game that manages to remove acceleration control (one of the best bits of driving) whilst still remaining more strategic and engaging than other racers of its ilk, it’s shame to have a complaint, but I do.
As we reported a little while back, Kirby Air Riders creator and Smash Bros. guru Masahiro Sakurai has said that there will not be any more DLC for the game. Sad (and also slightly spoiled) face. And it’s a sad face because as much as I adore City Trial, I think its biggest strengths are drawn from and highlighted by its map – as a map you have to learn so well.
However, in having to get so very familiar with it to succeed against the best that online play can throw at you, only having the one to play on is something that’s gonna limit my time with this one, and maybe, ultimately, bring it to a premature end.
If I was aware of even one new City Trial map coming down the pipeline, I’d be confident in the fact that Kirby Air Riders would remain on my Switch 2 indefinitely. And it still may do, by the way, because I just can’t get enough of Rick.
Why? Well, because he’s a huge and cuddly hamster and I love him. But that’s a different story.
No, what I mean is why can’t we just have one more map? It’s not an issue in any way in the rest of the game’s modes, and the minigames that see out a round of City Trial are superb – nothing needs doing there.
Indeed, I fully feel as though Sakurai is being 100% genuine in his “Everything is here…I’ve thrown everything I have into this game from the start” statement when announcing that DLC was a no-go. I just…can’t we just have even one more? (How hard can it be to design a breathtakingly brilliant map that works in solo and online play for player counts that vary wildly? I mean, come on.)
There’s a ton of content here when you dig into Air Ride, there’s endless reams of stuff to unlock and collect in the form of characters, tracks, and machines in Road Trip, but the very nature of City Trials, with its hyper-fixation on this single (admittedly large and very well thought-out) Skyah map, surely means that it’ll only continue to thrive and surprise if they chuck more maps in there for the long-term riders to tuck into.
C’mon, Nintendo. Let us feast on the fun of learning another area inside out whilst crushing our foes in online match-ups.
Enjoying Kirby Air Riders’ City Trial mode? Think it needs another map? Be sure to let us know in the comments
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