Twin-stick shooters didn’t die, they just went quiet while the industry chased bigger budgets and longer runtimes. Then Sektori dropped on November 18, 2025, and reminded everyone why Geometry Wars was so special in the first place. Developed by Kimmo Lahtinen, a former Housemarque developer who worked on classics like Super Stardust HD and Resogun, Sektori takes everything that made arcade twin-stick shooters great and evolves it with roguelike progression and dynamic arenas. PC Gamer called it the best game they played this month, and the passionate response from arcade fans suggests this might be the genre’s stealth revival.
What Makes Sektori Special
At its core, Sektori is a twin-stick shooter where you pilot a ship through waves of enemies using the left stick to move and right stick to shoot. That’s the foundation Geometry Wars established nearly two decades ago, and Sektori respects those roots completely. What sets it apart is how it builds on that foundation without overcomplicating things. The game introduces just enough new mechanics to feel fresh while maintaining the pure, addictive flow that made the genre legendary.
Your ship comes equipped with three attack types. The Blaster is your standard weapon that fires exactly where you aim, providing precise control for targeting specific threats. Missiles fire alongside your Blaster once unlocked and automatically track enemies, letting you focus on movement while maintaining offensive pressure. The Strike ability acts as a dash-melee hybrid, sending your ship forward before triggering an explosive shockwave with area-of-effect damage.
The Strike mechanic is where Sektori’s depth reveals itself. It operates on a cooldown that feels agonizingly long during intense moments, but you can instantly recharge it by striking into various tokens scattered across the arena. These include selection tokens for upgrades, score tokens for points, and evolver tokens for progression. Learning to chain strikes by bouncing between tokens while simultaneously clearing enemy waves creates a flow state that rivals the best moments in Geometry Wars 2.
Roguelike Progression That Actually Works
As you destroy enemies, you collect Glimmer that fills a meter. Once full, a selection token spawns, pausing gameplay and presenting you with upgrade choices. These range from speed increases and shields to enhanced attack power for your Blaster, Missiles, or Strike abilities. The roguelike progression system gives each run a sense of building power without destroying the arcade purity that defines the genre.
Importantly, the upgrades enhance your capabilities rather than fundamentally changing how the game plays. You’re still dodging, shooting, and managing positioning. The power increases make you feel more capable of handling the escalating difficulty rather than breaking the game’s balance. This restraint shows Lahtinen understands what made classics like Super Stardust HD work – the core loop must remain pure even as complexity increases.
You can also equip a shield that allows three hits before game over, adding a small margin for error without making the game trivial. Shields create interesting risk-reward decisions during runs. Do you play aggressively and potentially take damage to maximize score, or do you preserve your shields for later waves when patterns become overwhelming? These micro-decisions stack up to create strategic depth beneath the surface-level action.
Dynamic Arenas Keep You Constantly Adapting
One of Sektori’s most innovative features is how arenas constantly evolve during play. The battlefield doesn’t remain a static rectangle like in classic Geometry Wars. Instead, it grows, shrinks, changes shape, and introduces new obstacles as you progress through waves. Getting caught in the wrong position when the arena transforms means instant death, forcing you to maintain spatial awareness beyond just tracking enemy positions.
This dynamic element prevents the optimization that eventually makes traditional twin-stick shooters feel mechanical. You can’t memorize safe zones or establish predictable patterns when the playfield itself becomes an active threat. The arena transformations sync with the game’s pacing, intensifying pressure at exactly the moments when you’re already struggling to manage enemy density. It’s brilliant design that keeps veteran players engaged even after mastering enemy patterns.
The campaign contains six different stages, each culminating in boss fights that test your abilities in unique ways. Bosses range from giant spinning engines that spew bullets and lasers to snake-like creatures that spawn obstacles while darting through the map. The entire sequence of each boss encounter randomizes every playthrough, ensuring you can’t simply memorize attack patterns and execute them robotically.
Six Game Modes Beyond the Campaign
Beyond the main campaign that introduces mechanics and progression, Sektori includes six additional modes that remix the formula in interesting ways. Classic mode most closely resembles traditional Geometry Wars, placing you in a large static arena where survival depends purely on movement and shooting without the campaign’s evolutions or transformations.
Surge mode alternates your ship between weak and strong forms, forcing strategic token collection to enter powered-up super states where you can unleash massive firepower. Gates mode disables your weapons entirely, requiring you to fly through gates to destroy enemies in a premise fans of Geometry Wars 2’s Pacifism mode will immediately recognize and appreciate. It’s a direct homage that proves Lahtinen knows exactly what resonated with hardcore twin-stick shooter enthusiasts.
Assault mode lets you manually trigger difficulty increases rather than having them occur automatically, giving players control over pacing and risk-reward decisions. Boss Rush takes the campaign’s various larger enemies and chains them together in sequence for pure challenge runs. Crash mode focuses entirely on the Strike ability, removing your other weapons and forcing creative use of the dash-melee mechanic through entire runs.
While reviews note that these challenge modes don’t quite capture the magic of the standard campaign, they provide variation and unique score challenges. Each mode has its own leaderboards, creating comfortable amounts of content for players who want to master every aspect of the game. Not every mode will click with every player, but having options respects that different people enjoy different types of challenges.
Visual and Audio Design That Creates Flow States
Sektori’s presentation deserves special attention because it directly contributes to gameplay rather than just looking pretty. The game uses vibrant neon colors against dark backgrounds, creating the visual clarity that’s essential for twin-stick shooters. You can instantly identify threats, track power-ups, and understand arena transformations even during the most chaotic moments. This isn’t just aesthetic polish, it’s functional design that prevents deaths from visual confusion.
The electronic soundtrack pumps adrenaline through every session, with beats that sync to gameplay rhythms in ways that create genuine flow states. Multiple reviewers noted how they started moving in sync with the music, entering that zone where conscious thought disappears and pure instinct takes over. This is the hallmark of great arcade design – when the audio, visuals, and gameplay merge into a single experience where you become one with the game.
Rainbow Mode adds an extra layer of engagement by requiring players to collect letters that appear to the music’s beat. On the easiest difficulty you spell MIRAGE, medium requires SEKTORI, and hard demands REVOLUTION. This optional challenge gives score chasers another element to optimize while maintaining focus on survival and point accumulation. It’s the kind of depth that reveals itself gradually rather than overwhelming new players immediately.
Why This Matters for the Genre
Twin-stick arcade shooters have struggled to find mainstream success in recent years despite a dedicated fanbase that never stopped loving the genre. While roguelikes and roguelites exploded in popularity, pure arcade experiences became niche products that major publishers mostly ignored. Housemarque itself pivoted from arcade shooters to narrative-driven action with Returnal, which was critically acclaimed but fundamentally different from their earlier work.
Sektori proves the genre didn’t need reinvention or massive budgets. It needed someone who understood what made classics like Super Stardust HD and Geometry Wars 2 special and was willing to refine those ideas with modern sensibilities. Lahtinen clearly learned from his Housemarque days, then spent time thinking about how to evolve the formula without abandoning its soul. The result feels both timeless and contemporary.
The game launched at a reasonable price point on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC via Steam without major marketing fanfare. This grassroots approach mirrors how many classic arcade games found their audiences – through word of mouth from passionate players who couldn’t stop talking about their experiences. Reddit threads and gaming forums are already filled with fans declaring Sektori the Geometry Wars successor they’ve been waiting years for.
FAQs
What is Sektori and when did it release?
Sektori is a twin-stick arcade shooter developed by former Housemarque developer Kimmo Lahtinen that launched on November 18, 2025, for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC via Steam. It combines classic Geometry Wars-style gameplay with roguelike progression and dynamic arenas.
Who created Sektori?
Kimmo Lahtinen developed Sektori after working at Housemarque on acclaimed arcade shooters like Super Stardust HD and Resogun. His experience with those classics clearly influenced Sektori’s design philosophy of maintaining pure arcade gameplay while introducing modern innovations.
How is Sektori different from Geometry Wars?
Sektori builds on Geometry Wars’ foundation by adding roguelike upgrade progression, a Strike dash-melee ability that can chain between tokens, dynamic arenas that transform during gameplay, and boss fights. These additions create depth without abandoning the pure twin-stick shooter core.
What game modes does Sektori include?
Beyond the main campaign, Sektori offers six modes: Classic (traditional static arena), Surge (alternating weak/strong forms), Gates (weapons disabled, destroy enemies through gates), Assault (manual difficulty triggers), Boss Rush (sequential boss battles), and Crash (Strike ability only).
Is Sektori good for people who don’t usually like twin-stick shooters?
Multiple reviews suggest Sektori has the potential to convert players who aren’t typically fans of twin-stick shooters. The roguelike progression provides a sense of building power that makes difficulty curves feel more approachable, while the visual and audio design creates engaging flow states.
What platforms is Sektori available on?
Sektori is available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC via Steam. The game launched simultaneously across all platforms on November 18, 2025, without any exclusivity windows or platform-specific content restrictions.
How does the Strike ability work in Sektori?
Strike sends your ship dashing forward before triggering an explosive shockwave with area-of-effect damage. It operates on a cooldown but instantly recharges when you strike into tokens like selection tokens, score tokens, or evolver tokens, allowing skilled players to chain strikes continuously.
Are the boss fights in Sektori good?
Reviews are mixed on bosses. They’re visually impressive and present unique challenges, but some reviewers felt they kill the pacing by encouraging slow, safe play rather than the aggressive risk-taking that makes the regular waves exciting. Boss sequences randomize each playthrough to prevent pure memorization.
Does Sektori have leaderboards?
Yes, each of Sektori’s modes features its own leaderboards for score chasing. This creates comfortable amounts of content for competitive players who want to master every mode and climb the rankings across different challenge types.
The Bottom Line
Sektori didn’t need to revolutionize twin-stick shooters to succeed. It just needed to understand what made the classics special and respect that legacy while introducing enough innovation to feel relevant in 2025. Lahtinen clearly knows this genre intimately from his Housemarque days, and that expertise shows in every design decision. The game maintains the pure arcade flow state that made Geometry Wars addictive while adding roguelike progression and dynamic arenas that keep veterans engaged. It launched quietly without major marketing, but passionate word of mouth from arcade fans suggests it could become the genre’s stealth revival. For anyone who remembers losing hours to Super Stardust HD or chasing leaderboard positions in Geometry Wars 2, Sektori delivers exactly what you’ve been missing. And for newcomers curious about why people love twin-stick shooters, this might be the perfect entry point that finally makes the genre click. Sometimes games don’t need massive budgets or years of development to be special. They just need a developer who understands what they’re making and executes it with precision and passion.