Welcome to The Daily RoundUp where we’re less concerned with being daily and more concerned with the news of the day. Today is August 19th and…

Nintendo has given us our first look at ‘Kirby Air Riders’ through a 45 minute Direct released today. A sequel to the 2003 GameCube title ‘Kirby Air Ride’, Mahiro Sakurai (creator of Super Smash Bros.) has added a plural to the name – increasing the roster and seemingly the chaos present in the latest entry.

Kirby Air Ride had all the features that Mario Kart made standard, with Sakurai himself joking about the similarities, and was a fairly simple kart racer that happened to feature Kirby. For the most part, you would even be playing as just Kirby.

The Direct was built to show how things had changed in the 20 years since the original and how they planned to give the series much more personality.

This started with the riders themselves. The list of which has grown substantially to include proper renditions of Meta Knight and King Dedede as well as some lesser known Kirby characters like Waddle Dee, Waddle Doo and Chef Kawasaka.

Each character also comes with unique traits, attacks and stats that interact with the stats of your Machine (their name for karts). The Machines also have their own unique properties with some having completely unique ways of drifting. They’ve given every character Kirby’s iconic copy ability and a special button that acts as an ultimate.

It didn’t take long to get the impression that a really important goal for Air Riders is that there is a lot of variety, everything feels good to use, and that there is a never ending sense of absolute chaos.

Basic racing is built in a way that promotes constant interaction between players. You are reward with boosts for attacks and you aren’t punished too hard for getting hit. There is a Star Trail mechanic left by characters ahead of you and if you gobble up the trail you go zoom. Everything seems very designed to keep players close and competitive until the very end.

You can even see this in the reduction to six players on your average race so the chaos keeps a little reigned in.

This extends to the modes, namely City Trials – a returning mode form the original game. You have five minute inside of a decently sized free-roam map to find the machine or your choosing and collect stat upgrades for it in an attempt to create the strongest machine possible. All the while avoiding various calamities like giant spikey balls falling from the sky.

At the end of the five minute you are put into a stadium, which is a sort of randomised mini-game, and attempt to win it. They clearly expect this mode to be very replayable with a decent mixture of stadiums and the randomised nature of it.

It can also be played with 16 players online so I can have no doubt it would be a disaster in the best way possible.

The Direct also displayed some tracks, smaller mechanics, and a lot more characters. I recommend watching the full stream for all the details which you can do here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gn5c4RkoYAc

On a first impression: it seems to me that, where Mario Kart has become a known entity (even with World’s innovations) and has seen a large increase in skill disparity between the maniacs who can run every track blindfolded and the people who just play for fun, Kirby Air Riders look designed to keep players in close competition and encourages you to scrap it out. It looks crazy and hints at a really fun, casual kart racer that I look forward to seeing release on November 20th 2025.