Sektori

I am legitimately addicted to this game. Seriously. I gave up alcohol and now I have this game and I can't stop.

The universe gave humans the luxury of free thought and still people will look you dead in the frontal cortex and swear to you that Elden Ring is a better game than this.

for players who seek punishment

Shoot 'em up Berlin Edition. You have to play it to understand it I would argue this is a 'perfect' game every (sound) effect is there for a reason and cue's you in to what exactly is happening. Awesome!

The best twin-stick shooter since Nex Machina, thereby cementing Finland as the capital of GOAT twin-stick shooters. What impresses me the most is that it's actually an arcade game disguised as a roguelite, instead of the other way around like usual. Recently we have been getting more arcade-y games like Absolum that try to modernize arcade gameplay with roguelite (meta-)progression systems and randomized level design, but these often end up lost in the sauce and become more about numbers and builds the deeper you get into them. Sektori somehow strikes a perfect balance: it has all the pros of roguelite elements and none of the negatives. It has all the run variation and unpredictability you'd expect of a roguelite, but without outright ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ RNG or the progression systems overpowering the core gameplay. Plus, you can unlock almost everything within three hours of playing. This was inevitably done by reducing how much influence the progression elements have on the gameplay, meaning that you're going to be disappointed if you're the kind of player that likes devising overpowered builds. But for the kind of gameplay that Sektori is going for, I'd say it is a net positive. And unlike most arcade games, Sektori isn't the kind of game that you need to bust open a Practice Mode for to practice stages individually. Hell, it doesn't even have a Practice Mode. It's basically unthinkable for any modern arcade shmup/beat 'em up release to not include some kind of practice mode or stage select, but in Sektori it's absence is barely even felt. Outside of the boss fights, there are no massive difficulty spikes or difficult parts that you would need to memorize, nor would it even make sense to do so with its randomized boss order and arena order. This really is a game that you can just keep getting better at by just playing it instead of practicing it like you're doing homework. The scoring and more randomized aspects ensure that replaying the first few stages remains fresh on repeat playthroughs, but there are still enough unique stage layouts and new enemy types regularly being introduced to make each stage feel distinct. That said, the boss fights do have some "tricks" to their attack patterns that take some time to really understand (like figuring out how to move through the spinny ring boss' rings), and that is exactly where having a more robust boss select would have come in handy. The existing Boss Rush mode comes close to doing that, but it doesn't let you practice bosses individually. Even more impressive is that despite the heavy emphasis on unpredictability and controlled injections of RNG, is that Sektori has a competitively worthwhile scoring system. It is actually highly unusual for an arcade game to do so; newer arcade games (shmups in particular) are rather scared of adding RNG, because RNG tends to not mix well their scoring systems. Basically, there's little point to high score chasing on the leaderboards if how high your score is might depend heavily on luck. The way Sektori pulls this off is that it gives you a lot of means to mitigate the randomness. Most of its scoring comes down to regularly dashing into tokens to keep up a multiplier, but the spawn position of tokens is random. Sometimes a token might be out of reach, or in a part of the arena that is about to change, but you can then mitigate this by keeping a surplus of multiple tokens on the field, instead of picking up every token as soon as possible. So if you can't reach a token in time before your multiplier decays, then you always have other tokens to dash into as a backup. Of course, tokens quickly despawn if not picked up long enough, so you can't build up a ridiculously big surplus either. At the same time there are other pressures at play: sometimes you are about to get overwhelmed by enemies, and sometimes it might pay to dash into a token sooner than intended, as doing so also briefly boosts your rate-of-fire and clears out all enemies/bullets around you. Sometimes your dash is on cooldown right when you need to pick up a token, but you can instantly recharge your dash cooldown by purchasing an upgrade as a sort of fallback, even if your currently selected upgrade isn't the one you currently wanted. It's one beautiful well-oiled machine. Every function serves multiple purposes, and every goal has multiple competing and contradicting goals, where figuring out how to thread the needle to satisfy each one is the satisfying part. It's never 100% clear what is the most optimal way to play, and that is what keeps Sektori fresh on each run. The implementation of the randomness isn't 100% perfect -- there are some randomly chosen areas here and there where it's basically impossible to keep your chain and multiplier going -- but it's good enough. I love this game so much, because it's useful to learn from for arcade and action roguelite games both. For arcade games it shows how to tactfully implement unpredictability with a worthwhile scoring system, and for action roguelites it shows that you don't really need to double down on RPG elements to have run variety. Truly, a best of both worlds.

i'm bad at it, but i don't care. It's eye-popping Evangelion NERV-esque graphical geometry wars. Bought as a quick time killer and boy does it kill time.

When I close my eyes I see Sektori; please help

A lot of negative reviews are focusing solely on difficulty, so I'll try to address why I think Sektori is needlessly difficult. I'm going to focus exclusively on campaign, because the less random Arcade modes are more balanced imo. I'm not going to claim that anything is impossibly hard, only that some of the difficulty is due to some frustrating design decisions. The following elements actively getting in the way of players using the tools meant to overcome the increasing challenges of a run. Upgrades: Tracking whether or not you've got enough points to buy an upgrade requires glancing away from the action or counting in your head. In a game where decisions happen in fractions of seconds, this means the UI causes frustrating deaths. They could instead either add a simple indicator somewhere center screen (you learn the upgrade order quickly) or better yet, have the voice that announces the chosen upgrade instead announce the level you've reached. I don't need to be told I just bought missiles, I would love to be told I reached that upgrade level. Strike: This is clearly meant to be a central mechanic given the token synergy and score multiplier. I have read many people talking about taking the upgrades last and deprioritizing the related decks. It creates complete visual chaos which sometimes leads to an enemy or bullet blindsiding you after the strike. The recharge indicator is difficult or impossible to see even if I'm staring at my ship (you can crank the visibility of the line, but it's still not where I want to be looking). In a game of this style I rarely look at my ship. I am scanning for a safe path and targets. The ship is, at best, in my peripheral vision. A steady sound, a background hue, or some other very obvious indicator might work better. Also just my .02, but a small vacuum effect for points at the strike location would make a huge difference in how it feels. Building a perfect path of 10+ strikes only to be unable to collect any of the points feels terrible. Which leads me to: Level rotation: I get it. it adds to the chaos, but it has never once felt challenging when the level swaps to separated areas with no fully connected teleport path only to switch to more separate cells with no path at all. I have lost many tokens and points this way while sitting, bored, waiting for the action to start again. It breaks the flow and takes away player choice. Similarly having the level change to a configuration that completely blocks them before the ships from an objective even enter the screen just sucks. Decks: I won't go into why some decks are good or bad, I'm sure that could be debated. However, Challenge and up starts to really punish you for taking legendary cards to the point that it's often better to skip them unless you've mastered the game. The glaring example is losing your shields for large portions of time. For most players, carefully balancing the choice of buying more shields vs upgrades that increase power is how we survive a run. Suddenly losing the benefit of the shields I've carefully maintained or accumulated is rarely worth the risk. That means I'm being punished for getting lucky. It's a rug pull moment that feels bad. The upgrades often aren't good enough to warrant the risk which brings me to: when a card with a mediocre rare perk is presented as rare I effectively have one less option rather than an exciting better option. It also makes Rare Imports suicide for most players. The game at its core _is_ fun. The problem is that past Experience, it's not. Most people just aren't going to enjoy it past the first difficulty so I can't recommend it in its current state.

Incredible twin stick shooter. Very satisfying to learn and overcome the challenges. It's hard! But it feels great to play and is very rewarding overall. 10/10

Absolut Brilliant. Meisterwerk!!