Kirby Air Riders has been out for a little over a week now, and our good friends over at Digital Foundry have been busy diving into the nitty-gritty to deliver a technical analysis of the pink puffball's latest adventure.
Right from the jump, DF states that Air Riders "nails" the fundamentals, with super fun racing, Smash Bros. vibes, and super detailed new tracks.
From a technical perspective, the lighting is the game's first win, utilising Nvidia's RTXGI to light dynamic objects and keep the characters looking super smooth. Sure, this pushes ray-traced lighting to the side in favour of more simplistic light maps, but the entire performance benefits as a consequence. The finer details might not be the finest you've ever seen if you stop and look at them in isolation, but, as Digital Foundry repeatedly points out, Air Riders isn't a game where you'll be doing a lot of stopping.
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Engine-wise, the game runs in a new 'SOL-AVES' engine. While DF notes that we'll likely see far more impressive uses of it in the future, the engine produces something visually unique with a strong performance — not a bad start, then!
Onto resolution, and it seems that Air Riders is mostly running at 1080p in docked mode, with some shots occasionally going north of that — particularly in Top Ride mode, where you may be looking at 1440p. In handheld, DF found that things often sat at 900p, but they registered anything from 720p-1080p.
HDR implementation, on the flip side, is "exceptionally bad", with only the machines' particle effects seeming to make the most of the increased brightness. Everything else appears "washed out and dim" when using HDR, resulting in something that ends up looking "unnatural and borderline broken". Yikes.
Fortunately, performance fares much better. While there is no 120Hz option, the game delivers a "pretty much stable" 60fps, only occasionally dropping the odd frame (somewhat more frequently in City Trial mode). Three and four-player split screen aims for 60, but often ends up slightly lower, with City Trial, again, being the worst-hit mode at between 40-50fps — so, very admirable, but not quite there.
In our review, we called Kirby Air Riders "a chaotic and frenzied racer, there's no doubt, but it's got depth for those who wish to learn and plenty of competition to be had both online and at harder difficulties for diehards". You'll find our full thoughts, as well as those from Digital Foundry's shiny new site, by following the links below.