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The creampuff is back... racing? Yes, well, if you know your Nintendo history as well as I do, you know that this game has finally arrived five years too late. The game had been originally slated for the N64, and it got scrapped in favor of the Crystal Shards, which was a bust. Finally, the game got pushed to the GCN in a similar style to Resident Evil 0, which had also been originally slated for the N64 first. Kirby's Air Ride is certainly a fun game for the youngsters, but after five years it is really sad that the best game that they could come up with is pretty mediocre.
The racing basics are all there, and that is nice to see and all that. You can tell this game was designated for the younger crowd because the game is so depressingly easy you could probably beat it with one hand. The five-to-nine crowd should get a kick out of the game, though.
The graphics are standard fare as far as the GCN goes, and there are some pretty lame backgrounds and there is some pop-up that does come around, so there are minuses here, but the wide variety of colors is reminiscent of Kirby, so we have that to feast our eyes on.
The controls are pretty basic and pretty fluid for the most part. They should have made the controls a little looser because some turns are extremely tight, but that doesn't really matter in the end.
The music is very high-pitched and annoying, and I turned the sound down for the most part, but the sound effects, from the bits that I heard, were actually quite good and they had a sense of realism to it, which is a far cry from the soundtrack that Nintendo created.
The game is fun for some, but not for all. The level design is uninspired and the gameplay is very simple that a toodler could beat it, but it will get its sales out of the demographic that Nintendo caters to for the most part. Kirby has always been a favorite of mine, and it is really quite sad that Kirby has been done such a disservice like this. Maybe it only deserves to be on side-scrollers. -- Chris Vavra, PGNx Media
---- Nov 7, 2003
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