Last year, many of my friends and colleagues praised Sektori, and I ended up buying it before even realizing it was developed by Kimmo Lahtinen. Most people now know them because of Housemarque, but I’ve known of Kimmo (AKA gimblll) from Day Repeat Day and Barbearian. Sektori is a twin-stick shooter that I thought was perfectly suited to portable play. I was actually surprised it wasn’t on Nintendo Switch last year, but I enjoyed my time with it on Steam Deck quite a lot.
A little while ago, a good friend of mine discovered the Nintendo eShop page for Sektori before the port was announced. I signed up to review it immediately, and here we are. Sektori, a game that fits the “perfect for Switch” tagline, is now finally on Switch 2, and the port is amazing when played handheld, but a bit lacking for TV play.
Before getting to the technical aspects, Sektori blends in elements of twin-stick shooters with a Gradius-like upgrade system. Initially, Sektori seems quite complex, and the difficulty doesn’t help with onboarding, but it is a masterfully-designed game that will likely be my favorite twin-stick shooter ever after I give it a year or two to simmer (I don’t like deciding on these very quickly).
You start with a basic ship on the easiest (still quite challenging) difficulty and begin with a few shields (lives) in a diamond arena. Your aim is to avoid enemies, shoot them down, and collect glimmer tokens (yellow tokens). These fill up the glimmer bar and then spawn upgrade tokens (blue) on the field. The top left of the screen has a list of upgrades you can unlock for this run. Sektori doesn’t just let you choose what you want though. You can move up the upgrade list by collecting more upgrade tokens. After you select an upgrade, your position on this chart resets.
This means you will need to collect four upgrade tokens if you want the fourth upgrade twice in a row. If you want to gain more shields (lives), that’s what you need to do. As you progress through a stage and time passes, the structure of the field changes with more enemies spawning. Things get quite hectic and you thankfully have an ace up your sleeve: The strike attack. This essentially is your get out of jail card because it lets you quickly dash through enemies and cause an explosion. Collecting a blue upgrade token also resets your strike attack. Your strike recharges, but there are ways to chain strikes depending on how you play and what you use it against.
In addition to the upgrades you can unlock to try and survive and take on the most challenging enemies and bosses and finish a run, you also have a roguelite (the game is not a roguelite, but it has one small element from it) card system that I had to look up a guide to understand last year on PC.
Beyond the campaign with multiple difficulty options, Sektori has a few added modes that are lovely additions to an already great game for the low asking price. They all have their own leaderboards as well, though I’ve been struggling to get back into the groove in some of them compared to on Steam Deck. Serves me right for not playing it regularly, I guess.
Visually, Sektori tiptoes between overly busy and a visual feast with its kaleidoscopic aesthetic, particle effects, and reactivity accompanied by an addictive score from Tommy Baynen. I’ve not run into any issues with Sektori handheld. In fact, it looks like the developer aimed for the same resolution both docked and handheld based on rough pixel counts I did for the actual 3D elements in gameplay. It targets 60fps in both modes and didn’t have any noticeable drops during my time with it.
On Switch 2, Sektori has a lovely HD rumble 2 implementation, and I have basically no complaints with how it is handheld. It also boots up super fast. If you play docked, it doesn’t look as crisp as it should even when I play on my 1440p monitor. I hope the docked image quality can improve in patches. It might not seem important in a game like this for some, but I value crisp visuals even more with Sektori’s style-blending kaleidoscopic aesthetic.
Sektori is a brilliant twin-stick shooter with an incredible soundtrack and one that is a perfect fit for handheld play on Nintendo Switch 2. If you skipped it before or simply want to play it on the go, it is more than worth the asking price. Just be prepared for a great challenge throughout.
Version Tested: Nintendo Switch 2
Review Copy Provided by Kimmo Factor
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