Super Smash Bros. creator Masahiro Sakurai has lifted the lid on his upcoming Nintendo Switch 2 title Kirby Air Riders, which looks like a widespread expansion of the original.
One of the most unexpected announcements during the Switch 2 reveal in April was Kirby Air Riders, a sequel to 2003’s Kirby Air Ride on the Nintendo GameCube.
The original didn’t set the world alight, with overly simplistic one-button controls and limited modes, so a sequel seems like an odd proposition – especially when it comes not long after fellow racer Mario Kart World.
While some fans speculated that Nintendo greenlit Kirby Air Riders as a favour to director Masahiro Sakurai, in exchange for a new Super Smash Bros. game, a 45-minute Nintendo Direct dedicated to Kirby Air Riders revealed the idea for a sequel came from elsewhere.
‘You might be wondering why I ended up creating a new Kirby Air Ride game,’ Sakurai said in the presentation. ‘There was a strong request from [Shinya] Takahashi, head of software development at Nintendo, and [Satoshi] Mitsuhara, the president of HAL Laboratory, Inc. at the time.
‘At the time, I was working on the DLC for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and wasn’t really able to get around to the request. But I managed to complete a written proposal at high speed.’
In the presentation, Sakurai covered all the new additions (and general basics) of Kirby Air Riders in some detail. The biggest change is that it’s no longer a one-button racing game. Along with the ‘boost charge’ to drift around corners for bursts of speed, there’s now a ‘special button’ to unleash power-ups specific to each character.
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These range from attacks to damage other racers, with Kirby unleashing a sword flurry, while others like King Dedede possess a turbo hammer to launch themselves forward at great speed. Others on the roster include Kirby staples such as Meta Knight, Magalor, and Banana Waddle Dee.
Whereas Kirby was the only playable character in the original who could ride different machines and use copy abilities to transform, this has been expanded to the whole roster in the sequel. Both the characters and the machines possess different stats too, in a similar vein to Mario Kart.
City Trial, a core mode from Kirby Air Ride, is back too. Here you roam an open area with up to 15 other players, either CPUs, locally, or against others online, to collect power-ups to boost your machine’s stats, before you compete in a mini-game with your upgraded vehicle to determine the winner. These range from racing sprints, battles, a gliding mini-game, and Target Flight where you hit score panels.
For anyone who has played the original, it all looks familiar but with more robust options and a greater level of chaos. Sakurai has promised there are ‘still a lot of things’ in Kirby Air Riders they ‘weren’t able to cover’ in this Direct too, so it might be expanded in other ways.
As confirmed in the Direct, Kirby Air Riders launches on Nintendo Switch 2 on November 20, 2025, priced at £58.99 in the UK. As such, this might be Nintendo’s Christmas title, although we’re still waiting on a release date for Metroid Prime 4: Beyond.
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