Sektori: Reach Enlightenment or Die Trying
Title: Sektori
Developer: Kimmo Lahtinen
Publisher: Kimmo Factor Oy
Genre: Twin-Stick Shooter
Release Date: November 18, 2025
Price (at the time of writing): ¥1790, $14.99 USD
Website: https://www.gimblll.com/sektori/
Sektori is result of 4.5 years of development time by a single Finnish dev named Kimmo Lahtinen. It's also probably the most refined version of the twin-stick shooter in recent memory, and the most recent release I can wholeheartedly recommend if you like the genre. I had a lot of fun times climbing the leaderboard in all of the big releases of Geometry Wars from back in the day, and I've been a big fan of shooters going back to the days of R-Type, Gradius, and Time Pilot. Sektori puts me in the same happy place as all those great shooters of old. They way you're just gradually learning to master the fine control of your ship so you can instinctually fit it into narrower and narrower safe gaps, shooting your way out of every situation possible, and that personal skill growth being reflected by your high scores getting exponentially larger.
Like Gradius, you'll pick up and store powerups that you can use modify your ship in a number of ways. Each of the 3 ship types have their own playstyles and their own upgrade paths. Sektori's take on the classic Geometry Wars formula also gives a little bit of modern tweak with rogue-lite evolutions that can take your runs in some wildly different playstyles. Your ship can evolve to have drones that can shoot enemies and take a hit for you. You can extend the range of your bullets and missiles, or push your ship beyond its typical limits in each category. I feel like Sektori stumbles a bit here, as I want the modifiers to be more fully fleshed out in a meta-game sense, or I'd rather just have vanilla powerups, a la Gradius. And, to be fair to Sektori, you can play it that way by just discarding all of the evolutions to go into Arcade mode, but it takes a bit of work to get that far.
Randomization also plays a part in Sektori's Campaign by swapping out the level designs at intervals. When it goes to switch designs, it creates dead zones in the level. If you're on one of these when the board switches, that's game over. This feels exceedingly harsh, as several times I've ended a promising run because I extended the distance my Strike will carry the ship, and while trying to Strike through a token to get that additional free Strike, I ended up a couple pixels too close to the edge. It feels like that should just cost me a Shield, not the entire playthrough. Speaking of, I also wish there was the option to restart the mode in the pause menu like there was in Geometry Wars. Terminating a run quickly so you could try and get back into the zone also felt like part of the muscle memory in that game, and it honestly feels missing to me here.
In terms of visuals, everything is clean and eyecatching in a way that isn't going to tax your graphics card. There's a lot on screen sometimes, but it never felt like it was taxing my system. The soundtrack is great, and one of the things in this game that I think is really underappreciated is the sound design. Every little beep has an important meaning attached to it, and if you decipher what all of them are trying to tell you, you will intruitively start to have better runs. Some beeps are trying to tell you a token's about to disappear, others indicate that your combo is about to drop, and some will tell you when particularly annoying enemies are gonna come hurtling straight for you. Sektori's an under-the-radar gem that I think a lot of people would really take a liking to. It's reasonably priced, it's on multiple platforms and consoles, and it's a labor of love from a hard-working indie dev who documented all that went into the development in this very extensive BTS.
This game has definitely earned my stamp of approval, and is one of my favorite games I've played in the last 12 months.