Kirby Air Ride (GameCube)

CNET editors' rating: 2.5 stars OK
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Overall score: 5.1 (2.5 stars)
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Product summary

Gamespot editors' review

• Reviewed by: Jeff Gerstmann
• Reviewed on: 10/15/2003
• Released on: 10/13/2003

Nintendo has never been a company to focus squarely on driving or racing games, but the stars have aligned in such a way that the company will be releasing three such games in the back half of 2003. F-Zero GX is already out and brings with it a difficulty that is sure to please hardcore fans. Mario Kart: Double Dash!! is up later in the year, and it should provide some new spins on an old favorite. Kirby Air Ride is, in this case, the awkward middle child. The game attempts to appeal to the younger crowd by being, basically, a one-button racing game. But the gameplay instead feels so stripped-down and boring that even your younger brother probably won't get much out of it.

Kirby Air Ride boils down to knowing when, exactly, to hit A.

Air Ride is actually three games in one, though all of them use the same basic mechanics. Air ride mode is the basic racing mode, letting you pick a track and get to racing. Top ride mode has a top-down view similar to classic arcade racing games like Super Sprint and Ironman Ivan Stewart's Super Off Road. City trial is a weird one. It gives you five minutes to cruise around a city to collect power-ups, then it tosses you into one of a handful of minigames with your newly enhanced vehicle. Though the city is nice and large, you never really get a sense of what to do while you're there, and the fact that the minigame at the end is randomly selected means that you might have spent the five minutes in the city looking for bonus items that make it impossible for you to do well in in the end. As you can imagine, that really isn't much fun, regardless of how many players you're playing with.

The basic control is the same from mode to mode. When you want to do something--anything--push A. Under normal use, the A button slows you down and begins to charge your boost meter. Letting off the button causes you to rocket forward. So the gameplay basically involves holding A around corners, sliding around to face the track ahead, and then letting off the button to fly out of the turns. Air ride mode also has various Kirby enemies on the track, and tapping A when they're near will suck them up using Kirby's powerful mouth. Some enemies give you abilities when eaten, such as sword attacks, fire or ice attacks, and so on.

The manual and tutorial videos constantly brag about the game's "super-easy controls" or the ability to "feel the speed and use Copy abilities with just one button!" While there's something to be said for designing a game that is easy to figure out, Air Ride takes this concept to a ridiculous extreme. For example, you can find a rocket launcher in the city. Rather than give you any fire control over the launcher, it simply starts rapid-firing as soon as you pick it up, and doesn't stop until its timer expires. Would it have been that difficult to simply make the B button act as a fire button? Kirby can and does execute a variety of tasks in the game, and to not use the GameCube's other five buttons is just silly. As a result, the gameplay is a real bore.

The game has quite a few things to unlock, and it manages this via checklists that cover each of the three modes. Each mode has 120 tasks to be accomplished, and each time you fulfill one of these objectives, it's marked off on your 12-by-12 checklist. The game doesn't tell you what, exactly, you have to do to mark off these boxes, and some of the criteria gets pretty arbitrary--for example, one of the tasks is to finish with a lap time that has the same number in both of the seconds columns. But to egg you along, marking off one of these boxes lets you see the criteria for the boxes around it, so you'll always have something to work for, should you feel so inclined. Most boxes don't unlock anything, but some give you new colors, new vehicles to choose from, sound tests, and other items.

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