What We’ve Played at Gamescom, Day Two: Kirby Air Riders, Super Meat Boy 3D, and More

By Elijah Gonzalez | August 21, 2025 | 5:22pm

Video Games Features Gamescom

Gamescom 2025 keeps trucking along, with several convention halls full of interesting upcoming games. Here’s everything notable that we checked out on Day 2.

Kirby Air Riders

Gamescom 2025

After a very long stint on the Smash series, Masahiro Sakurai returns to his beloved creation with Kirby Air Riders, a racing game that continues to be a weird, somewhat difficult-to-place thing. Like its predecessor on the GameCube, this latest take has an unusual control scheme, specifically in that your vehicle picks up speed without you pressing a button. Beyond this, the A button is used to charge your ride for a speed boost, you can shake the left stick to do a spin attack, and you hold Y to jump off your vehicle. But while its core feel is similar to the original, this sequel supercharges basically every aspect of the experience by adding a few complexities.

For instance, if you land parallel to the ground after taking to the skies, you get a noticeable speed boost. Another example is that if you hold the Y button while approaching a wounded enemy, you can outright flying kick them off their ride and steal it for yourself. Additionally, the demo I played showed off the series’ most well-known mode, City Trial, which somehow feels even more frantic than the original thanks to the seemingly faster movement speed and abundance of power-ups that will have you shooting electricity and slicing opponents. For those who’ve never played Air Ride’s main offering, it has opponents duke it out in a free-for-all, collecting upgrades littered throughout a city, before everyone utilizes these to compete in an ultimate challenge, like a race or flying test. While I’m not sure what the game’s overarching structure will be, I’m very much hoping it expands significantly on the barebones original. If nothing else, though, the central air racing controls like a dream.

Super Meat Boy 3D

As a 3D follow-up to a deservedly beloved precision platformer, I was initially quite skeptical about whether Super Meat Boy 3D could mimic the original’s speed and pinpoint accuracy. Thankfully, from what little I played, I was pleasantly surprised. One core ingredient why this iteration seems to work is that it introduces certain simplifications compared to other 3D platformers, which let it maintain its speed without making players want to hurl. Specifically, it uses a fixed perspective, so no wrestling with the camera, and you can only move in eight directions. Through this streamlined approach, they’re able to maintain the distinctive feel of the original game without it being overwhelming. It recreates the tension of just barely clearing a spinning razor blade or the situations where you repeatedly wall jump to time a perfect leap. There’s also an air dash now, and it fits quite well, making room for new types of diabolical challenges. In short, my sample of Super Meat Boy 3D translated this series to a new dimension.

PUBG: Blindspot

There isn’t much new under the sun, but PUBG: Blindspot combines some very well-explored templates to arrive at something different. To put it simply, it’s a multiplayer shooter that plays a bit like if you took Counter Strike or Rainbow Six: Siege and pulled the camera back until you were looking down on the battlefield like in a tactics game. However, instead of commanding a squad, here you control a single unit, MOBA-style. At this point, things more or less work as you’d expect: move with WASD, use the mouse to aim and shoot, hit CTRL to crouch, and so on.

As for the default objective type, it’s basically just Counter Strike, tasking teams with either arming a bomb on an objective or stopping this from happening. But more than just taking an FPS and switching the camera angle, this top-down view ties in with an interesting differentiating factor, which is that you can shoot through walls. As a result, you’ll have to play carefully to avoid getting blasted from across the map by opponents who share your bird’s eye view. Other nuances include that each character has their own unique abilities, like a radar or a big ass hammer, and that certain weapons can be aimed at heads and knees. While the core elements of PUBG: Blindspot are familiar, it approaches these ideas from a different perspective.

Invincible VS

You can’t exactly crack the code to a fighting game in 15 minutes, but my brief hands-on with Invincible VS got me a bit closer to this point than I expected due to its intuitive mechanics. Based on the Invincible comics/TV show, this is another tag fighter in what’s quickly become a crowded release calendar for the sub-genre. In this one’s case, getting new players in is definitely a primary focus; the game uses simple inputs instead of motion commands, there are autocombos, there’s a dash macro, and characters could perform a fairly easy universal combo by inputting light, then medium, then heavy attacks into a launcher. Thankfully, there still seems to be some complexities, with very different movement options per character, like floats and air dashes. Add in a whole bunch of mechanics around combo breaks, snapbacks, and more alongside the base complexity found in almost any tag fighter, and there’s some interesting potential here. While the game doesn’t have the most eye-popping art design and combos seem a bit too short at the moment, with some tweaks, this could be another fighting game to look out for.

Esoteric Ebb

After ZA/UM fractured into a million pieces, there’s a whole wave of Disco Elysium-inspired titles from different factions that worked on the original. While Esoteric Ebb isn’t part of this diaspora, you’d be forgiven for making that assumption given how it sticks to that game’s general structure. As if it’s based on the same tabletop ruleset, this is another CRPG based almost entirely around dialogue decisions, where your stat proficiencies are personified as internal dialogue. Of course, the big difference in this case is that it’s set in a high fantasy setting instead of the Soviet bloc-like Revachol.

You play as an amnesiac Cleric attempting to unravel a political conspiracy in a dense world where workers’ movements, religious orders, and Fantasy Stuff collect in a melting pot. Visually, the art style has a distinct, colorful look, and the music intentionally separates itself from the typical orchestral fare you’d associate with High Fantasy, instead opting for melancholy synths. Perhaps most importantly, its dialogue has me impressed, conveying a mostly hilarious and occasionally more somber tone that leaves me hopeful this one has the writing chops to make this style of narrative-focused CRPG work. Disco may be dead, but this Cleric is ready to party.

Tides of Tomorrow

Over the course of the Tides of Tomorrow demo I went from being deeply confused about the game in question to reaching a place of understanding. In this “asynchronous multiplayer adventure,” as the intro puts it, you make choices that influence not only your world, but other players’ too. Set in a future where global warming has left humanity living on a flooded Earth filled with plastic trash, you play as a Tidewalker, someone who can see the past decisions of those who share their ability. Specifically, you select one other real-world player to follow, making it so that the state of your world is the direct result of their past actions—in your game’s canon, this other player’s character came through these locales before you. To illustrate how much these decisions can branch the story, we were shown two different playthroughs: in one rendition, you quietly explore a town square while making conversation, while in another, you partake in a stealth segment while sneaking through that same town square that’s locked down by heavy-handed cops. On top of the asynchronous nature of the game affecting the gameplay, it also ties into a story about how one generation’s path affects the next; specifically, it’s a game undeniably about climate change. Here, your character is trying to find the cure to a disease caused by mutated microplastics. Between its extremely unique twist and solid storytelling setup, Tides of Tomorrow seems like a forward-looking take on choice-based narrative games.

Monsters Are Coming! Rock & Road

Even as someone who never fell down the Vampire Survivors rabbit hole, I can see the appeal of Monsters Are Coming! Rock & Road, a roguelike where you control an auto-attacking little guy attempting to defend a walking fortress. There is a lot going on at once, but basically, you’re trying to fight off the swarms of large spiders and other creepy crawlies trying to destroy your city, which slowly moves downwards towards its destination. Along the way, you make a truly alarming number of decisions regarding how to build your moving base, adding attachments that range from various types of turrets to plots of land that will net you resources. My brief time with the game instantly communicated its appeal as I ran from one corner of the screen to the next, chopping down trees and destroying rocks that blocked my city’s path, while upgrading my playable character and battlements with branching synergies: I opted for a freeze-oriented build that slowed down my attackers, but it seems like there’s a huge amount of variables. With so much control over how a run goes, Monsters Are Coming! includes the brain-scratching pleasures of both tower defense and auto-shooters, resulting in a concerningly fun package.

Mio: Memories in Orbit

Metroid-styled games are quite easy to come by these days, and at a convention where the sequel to one of the best of these was finally playable, it’s even harder to stand out from the pack. In that admittedly imposing context, Mio: Memories in Orbit wasn’t quite able to distinguish itself from the pack. On the more positive side, it certainly has a setting that left me eager to learn more, as you control a robot in a decaying world full of machines in states of disrepair. But outside of its intriguing setup, the 2D platforming and exploration here didn’t quite feel like anything new; these elements didn’t feel bad or anything, just unremarkable. It certainly didn’t help that the demo I played picked up from the very start of the story, where the protagonist only had a jump and a 3-hit combo attack instead of the lineup of upgrades they’ll presumably get later. Honestly, it’s quite possible that the game will find its groove once you get a more comprehensive toolset and are given more time to explore this space.

Elijah Gonzalez is an associate editor for Endless Mode. In addition to playing the latest, he also loves anime, movies, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Bluesky @elijahgonzalez.bsky.social.