We played Kirby Air Riders on Switch 2! [Hands-on Preview]

Kirby Air Riders certainly has a high level of craftsmanship, but maybe our hype has been tempered a bit.

Air Riders is one of the biggest games coming to the Switch 2 this year, and we had a chance to go hands-on with it at PAX West this weekend. While it’s a great looking, great sounding game, the demo didn’t do much to convince us yet that it was something special.

Consisting of four phases, the hands-on session was at times too much and at times not enough. Our sessions were divided into groups of four. Kicking off with a required viewing of Nintendo’s Air Riders Direct (yes, we watched around 15 minutes of the actual video of Director Sakurai playing the game and giving tips) we moved onto a mandatory tutorial section, playing at least 4 of the lessons meant to teach us how to control the game. We completed our tutorials early, and having to wait for the other players was a bit excruciating.

When it came to actually playing the game against others, the demo had two separate parts. The first, City Trial, tasks us with traveling around the game’s sky-based island to pick up our rideable machines and the many, many icons that dictate the stats that said machine will use. The City Trial seems to be a little excessive, at least in this demo session, as we rarely saw the other three players, instead taking down bots and environmental hazards. Nothing from the City Trial carries over into the final part of the demo except for the stats and our machine, so no matter how often we took out our opponents it didn’t seem to really matter. That final portion was disjointed, as we all choose one of four mini-games on the screen to battle our opponents in. It could be a drag race, a collectathon, or even an arena battle. It’s not set up like a majority vote, meaning that whatever mini-game players choose is what they will play, and they may not play against their opponents at all if they don’t select the same one. This happen to each session, and made for us wondering if there was any actual link to playing the City Trial and these secondary areas at all.

While we’re still looking forward to the game with an actual sitdown, lengthy session from the beginning, this demo didn’t do much for us, and may have actively pulled down our hype a little.

SideQuesting had a chance to go hands-on with the game at PAX West 2025.