Topic: Kirby Air Riders

....meh...

An update to say I still love KAR, but it's almost impossible now to get a Top Ride game.

Does anyone play online? How's the competition? How's the balance?

1. Does anyone play online?

I play quite often, but sometimes it feels like no. Outside of events, it can often take a while for lobbies to fill up. Hopefully this game sees some nice sales so the player base can be built up more, cause otherwise this game's online scene may end up in a really bad spot.

2. How's the competition and balance?

I think it's pretty good. I win a fair amount and I didn't even notice the different stats of characters until about 2 weeks ago. It doesn't feel sweaty at all, and I haven't seen any sort of popular meta build. Also, there's skill classes (though I don't know how much they're mixed around, as I've definitely been matched with people in other classes before).

@UpsideDownRowlet thanks! I appreciate the rundown. Sounds like a bit of a shame. I own the original, but I haven't played the new one. I don't own a Switch 2. Looks wicked fun though, and I would hope the online keeps going. I wonder if them stopping updates and patches has warded people off. It's not really a living game anymore by today's standards.

The game is incredible but the online matchmaking is truly terrible and is the main reason I stopped playing the game after about like a month. Setting the matchmaking settings to anywhere doesn't even do anything so even at launch I was getting lobbies mostly filled with bots trying to play from Australia.

I think the game has a decent community and you can probably find people to play with in paddocks through Discord or whatever but if I can't just casually jump on and get a game through the in-game matchmaking I tend to lose interest in a game pretty quickly.

I would get this 100% but am scared of online being unactive. Especially that I live in a bad region, where its sometimes impossible to find online matches in some cases. Like I had no problem at all with lobbies playing Mario Kart but could NOT find one single player trying to play Smash Bros, same with Mario Tennis. For some reason :/ Not my connection issue 2 (play a lot of tekken online on ps5 as well)