It seems that about once a year we get an impressive arcade game release, with 2024’s being Kill Knight and 2025 having Sektori. Created by a former Housemarque veteran, Sektori spent four years in development, being perfectly crafted into the ultimate twin-stick shooter.
What is Sektori?
For most of this review, I’ll be describing the campaign mode and its workings, as it is the main game mode and where most of the meat is. Your goal is to get through five ever-changing levels separated by increasingly difficult modular boss fights in a randomized order. It kind of feels like a mini roguelike campaign with various upgrade cards to grab and permanent death.
Sektori’s arena never stops moving with constant, near-overwhelming enemy spawns and level shape changing every 30 seconds or so. The game forces you to be fully engaged with your surroundings and demands extremely quick reflexes and decision making. You cannot kite enemies around with typical circle strafe movement because 10 seconds later, the arena will completely change and force you to adapt.
There are two different systems for upgrading your ship to deal with the horde. On the left side of the screen, there’s a ladder of basic stats like speed, shields, and gun upgrades. Collecting blue “selector tokens” lets you climb one slot up the ladder, allowing you to choose which stat you specifically want, but at the same time demanding patience for the important weapon upgrades. It’s a unique system that’s hard to get used to, but I really like that it has you constantly planning and the required deliberation.
Secondly, there’s a “choose from three” system of upgrades you get through yellow tokens that spawn. This is where your run is going to take shape with stronger, unique upgrades like drones, magnets, and laser shows. These are chosen from specific decks of cards that you choose from in the main menu, so you can tailor your path to your playstyle.
While the enemies involved are just run-of-the-mill cannon fodder, Sektori ‘s biggest draw is the difficult multi-phase boss fights. There are a selection of five bosses that can show up, and the order in which they come is randomized. The cool part, however, is that depending on the difficulty and how far into the run you are, the different “generations” they can be. Also, on top of every boss having several modules to fight against, each version has several bullet hell patterns it can choose from. Because of the huge variety of boss versions there are, you can’t rely as much on memorization compared to raw bullet dodging skill.
If you ever want to switch it up a bit and take a break from the complexity of the campaign, there are six different side-modes to choose from. These are taken straight from Geometry Wars, with your classic static arena game mode, with nothing to worry about but killing enemies and even a pacifist Gates game mode about luring enemies into traps. You can practice against all the boss variations in the boss rush mode, or just see how far you can get with only the dash attack. Unfortunately, there is no true infinite survival mode to truly test endurance, but there’s still plenty of optimization to be had in these shorter modes.
Sektori is visually and audibly immersive and *very* loud. Flashing neon lights and heavy-hitting bass kicks are everywhere, even in the menus! It absolutely takes a bit of time to parse the visual noise, and I can’t blame someone for being put off by it. There are luckily a few accessibility options to make things easier to grasp. The game is a gorgeous symphony of bright shapes and electronic beats that suck up all of your attention, making you oblivious to your real-life surroundings.
The Verdict
Sektori is the continued trend and evolution of highly polished and well thought out arcade shooters. It has a game mode for everyone with an overarching smart game design.
Sektori is out on PC. I played via access kindly provided by the publisher and their loyal customers in PR.
