SEQUENCE STORM

Great game with awesome music.

The game is good and fun....but the difficulty ratings for some of the stages are horribly mis-rated. They are either too high when they are easy, or too low when they are difficult.

This is quite a fun game. Good story, tight gameplay, and great music.

I like this game, I am totally blind and I can play this game thanks to the accessibility that the developer has put into the game, thank you very much for your hard work, I really recommend this game to those who love rhythm games

Intro

Let me start by saying that you should get this game. It's fun, challenging, and offers lots of replayability. The tracks are your standard-fare EDM by largely unknown artists. They're all pretty good (as are the beatmaps) and with the Workshop the track selection is only bound to improve. It's F2P so there's really no excuse not to try it out.

The Gameplay

Overall, the gameplay is incredibly fun. It's similar to Amplitude's but with a lot more inputs (9) and from what I can tell it's almost a carbon copy of Sound Vortex. So if those games are your thing, this probably will be, too. Most of the beatmaps are stellar and really fun to play, with many complex and interesting patterns.

That said, I have one big gripe with some of the songs: their reliance on track geometry to spike the difficulty. On some of these songs you can't even see the upcoming notes because the track is curved awkwardly (e.g the end section on Young Jaguar Theme). Missing notes on a pattern I know I can do, just because the track is making me play blind is incredibly unsatisfying, and makes me feel cheated. Similarly, other tricks are employed to achieve the goal of spiking the difficulty including FOV changes, spinning the camera around, random pauses in the middle of songs and random tempo changes in the middle of songs. I, personally, find all this very irritating.

The Controls

As I mentioned, there are 9 inputs in this game. You can use a keyboard for these, or a gamepad, or even a combination of the two. I attempted keyboard when I got the game, but it felt clunky and unnatural. To be fair, I had just come from playing Amplitude on the PS4, so that's probably the main reason I find Dualshock 4 to be the more intuitive and natural feeling way to play.

Some of the patterns are really hard to hit on the DS4. It took me a while before I realised that there were two binds for the long bar input on the DS4. Using both of these inputs (down on D pad & X) is mandatory on the higher difficulty songs, so I'd suggest getting used to pressing both sooner rather than later. Even with the two binds, some patterns are hard to hit. If you get right and left analog stick holds with intermittent long bar presses you have to contort your hands into an uncomfortable position to make the pattern possible. But overall I do think the limitations are surpassable, as Largahblarga has demonstrated. Just gotta git gud.

The Campaign

Personally, I have zero interest in the campaign. The racing aspect doesn't do it for me. Arcade mode is what I pumped the vast majority of my hours into. Revisiting the campaign after getting decent on Expert difficulty songs made it a slog to get through. Standard and Challenge are far too easy and Ultra difficulty never got properly refined, although I think the Dev is making an effort to rectify this. Ultra is basically the hard and expert difficulties put into the campaign. If you thought hard/expert was challenging in itself, when you play Ultra you also have to worry about your position, your boost and the track geometry! Brain hurty.

Arcade Mode

Arcade mode is where it's at. I've got ~180 hours in this game as of writing this review, and probably around 160 of those are in arcade mode. The leaderboards are the main motivator, for me. Chasing positions is super addictive, and it allows the competitive side of me to go wild. Due to the small community of players, you also start to recognise names and roughly know the skill level of each player. I have no clue who DRNM or Largah are but I know they're gods at this game haha.

The Track Editor

The track editor is hard to get your head around at first. There is a readme that does its best to explain, but for visual learners this really wasn't helpful. Luckily, the dev made a tutorial for the visually impaired folks, so despite having 20/20 I referred back to that a lot. Other than that, mapping a song and learning the editor involves a lot of trial and error. There are loads of settings and people have done some really creative stuff in the workshop, so clearly the editor is good. It just takes a fair amount of time to learn the nuances and all the little settings.

The DLC

More songs. I've played every song in the game, save for Heresmod's and Antimony's since you have to play the campaign to unlock those. I got the DLCs for more variety. Some new mechanics were added in each, including steering in Jelly's raceway and ceiling notes in Synchronised attack. New campaign sections were also added but, as I've mentioned, this doesn't interest me at all. The new songs really are very challenging, and I haven't even been able to complete half of them on Expert. I expect it'll take a while to get good at these songs, which is exactly what I was hoping for from these DLCs.

Conclusion

Get the game. Its fun and its free.

Unique game combining 2 concepts very well. Also fully accessible for the blind! This game will always be my favorite game to play, even though I'm not the best at rhythm. If I am feeling good, I can get a lot done in mission mode. And if I just want to have fun, I can play the arcade mode.

Great little gem of a game if you're into rhythm games. Very satisfying all round, easy to get value out of the price. Not too bad for just playing here and there, but equally I can see very easily you could sink a lot of time into it quickly.

Great range of difficulties, including the ability to skip over the easiest if you're already good at this kind of thing. Nice small story to go with it, ties the levels together in a campaign. Mechanically it feels excellent, and I really like the music actually, really fits in the vibe. Overall very polished and of a high standard.

The racing element is a different spin that adds a bit of something else, although maybe not always that active, in the sense you can easily be miles ahead so no longer becomes of much relevance. I've got a bit of the sense with the gimmicks that it might become a bit fiddly later that you really need to be quite optimised in how you approach some levels but I suppose for the most part it offers some variation/different challenge. Probably my least favourite bit of the game but OK.

Absolutely amazing and fun.

It doesn't force you to play easy difficulty through the early stages and tutorial levels which amazing for people like me who play games in this genre a lot.

The gameplay is exciting and the music is awesome. I love the story mode.

10/10

Seriously an underrated game, Very few rhythm games come close to the satisfaction that Sequence Storm has, and the track list is 99.99% bangers. The difficulty curve is incredibly challenging, but not impossible to overcome, I feel like I spent ages trying to transition from Medium to Hard, and even longer to even be able to simply finish a song on Extreme, but again it's entirely possible and very fun. I'll continue to buy the DLC for this game because the DLC tracks provide even more great songs to play and it seems like the difficulty and creativity of the maps continues to not only improve, but surprise me as a player.

10/10 Please buy this game, and support these amazing devs and artists.

Very underrated game, it's like a racing game meets SDVX. Well polished, a lot of content, super fun mechanics. Very similar to SDVX yet unique in it's own way. A lot of the songs are kind of mediocre in my opinion, but there's a surprisingly large amount of songs in the game and some are really really good.
Regardless the gameplay is very satisfying and there's a lot to do/have fun with. Even an entire story that offers narrative and different mechanics during the song you need to pay attention to! It provides a really fun balance of difficulty and diversity.

I'm disappointed that I never heard of this game until now, In it's current state it looks like it's been trapped in the unknown territory of the Steam Store. Don't let the low amount of reviews fool you out of this amazing game. It's also clear the developer has a passion for this project with how many updates it receives. Props to them for maintaining such an amazing game with a fairly small playerbase (at least on Steam). I hope to see this game blow up someday it deserves it!

Relax, close your eyes and enjoy.
That's right a rhythm game for the Visually Impaired.
Text to Speach is available and game play options gan be tweaked so you are relying on your ears rather than your eyes.
I slowly got used to things, it is just a shame I have the sense of rhythm of a drunken elephant on an ice rink, this I cannot penalise the Devs for.
We have both a story mode and Arcade mode, and whilst Electronic Dance Music is not my first choice on the stereo it fits well in this game.
All in all I would recommend this game for anyone, but if you are Visually Impaired and fancy something a little different, give this a go.

I expected this game to be nothing more but a decent quality SDVX clone with some original tracks. However, within first couple of minutes, I realised that this is waay much more than just a clone.

As of time of writing this review I'm done with Act 1 so there's a lot more to be discovered, but I wanted to write this review while the game is still on sale and has increased visibility. I also have to note that I'm an ASC player, so my experience may differ a little bit.

If you are new to the rhythm games you are probably going to completely ignore the arcade mode for a longer while and focus on the story mode, which is what makes this game really stand out. The story itself looks like it MIGHT go in a SUPERHOT direction, the setting makes it quite obvious, but that's absolutely not a bad thing.

The core gameplay formula is where things get really interesting. At its core it's still sdvx, but with "speedup" modifier. The better you play, the higher the scrolling speed is. You can use boost/"hyper drift" to pump that modifier up, which makes it a viable... racing game? Yes, the story mode is basically a racing game. Of course in arcade mode you can play the classic score attack, where the additional boost module is disabled completely. The story mode also contains many cool gimmicks, like barriers/enemies which damage and slow you down heavily if you don't dodge them using boost.

As ASC player I really dig the charts. The ones from the first act are mostly based around slams, which is quite uncommon in mid-tier sdvx charts iirc. Towards the end of the act, the patterns became really cool and fun to play around with, you can really feel the difficulty slowly increasing. The music is generally good, spanning many genres, with some truly outstanding tracks. There is also a workshop support, and people are already doing amazing job creating some high quality charts. Apparently there are some official DLCs coming, too! Oh and the original tracks have keysounds, it's a lovely detail.

Surprisingly there are A LOT of accessibility options. You can adjust timing windows, add audio cues for each note, change the color mappings, slow down the entire game, etc. There is even a special mode for blind people, how cool is that! It might as well be the most accessible rhythm game out there.

If you are into this stuff, just get it, you won't regret it. It's a product of love and passion, it deserves all the glory.

[added 2020/05/24]
I just beat the story mode, it's been a blast. I didn't expect a rhythm game to have such an interesting story, even if it's as simple as it is. Most of the music in the game has really grown on me, so I'll be surely coming back to try and beat it on higher difficulties. The final boss fight was yet another very positive surprise. It felt a lot like Thumper, it's a shame it wasn't longer to give it the real final boss feel.

Highly recommend that you give it a try. It's got a high skill-ceiling with an array of helpful options/tools to get you to those extreme charts. A fair warning; this game does incorporate more reading elements than your typical VSRG. The editor takes a bit of time to learn (I'd say 5 to 10 hours to get the hang of it.), but has a fast workflow once you figure things out.

More than anything, I think this game has potential. Just sticking with the game for a while, I've seen the game change a lot -- for the better too. Despite being a single developer, they often work on the game and is very responsive to the (rather small) community. A new note-type (something you don't see often in rhythm games), camera effects, a ton of world customization options in the editor, and many other things were added since I've started playing. It's incredibly impressive and I hope it pays off.

My biggest gripe definitely has to be with performance issues. It runs fine for me, but I'm aware that it doesn't run as well as a low-poly game should. Low-end computers will have some framerate issues which really shouldn't be there. There's also a lot of odd crashes, but they tend to get fixed rather quickly after being reported.

Workshop charts are in small quantity at the moment, but there's still some crazy, creative, and impressive content there. There's so much you can do in the editor, making it fun to work with. The main thing that limits creativity in the editor is performance issues and crashes, meaning you have to get creative with culling and what-not.

This developer cares more about video game accessibility than so many AAA devs. I will be a life long fan!

I've really only played Rockband/Guitar Hero type games, so wasn't sure what to make of this game when I heard about it. But I'm glad I did. Not only is it a fun game with an engaging story and tracks that are great, but the dev took the time to make his game accessible to those with disabilities, and got with those people to take their feedback. All menus and cutscenes read with speech as well as the audio cues mode for people who are blind, as well as the high contrast options and plenty of controller support for adjusting what you need.

Having been played rhythm games such as Space Channel 5 and Rhythm Heaven, Sequence Storm is able to provide something new and refreshing for new and veteran players alike.

I am generally not a fan of EDM, but I have to say that it really fits the game and its futuristic setting, which for some reason reminds me of the '80s cyber punk craze. Couple this with a fun and engaging story mode, a reward and upgrade system that encourages you to go beyond your limits and multiple, challenging difficulty levels and you get possibly one of the best rhythm games ever released.

A lot of effort has gone into providing accessibility features, such as a high contrast mode, timing settings, adjustable note colours, and narration and multiple audio cue modes for the blind and visually impaired that makes the menus and the story text accessible, with added extra descriptions where needed.

My only gripe is that there is no Sequence Storm 2 yet, and trust me, it will be yours too, soon enough.

This game is not easy, but it's really rewarding. The developer has done and is doing an excellent job adding accessibility features. I'm completely blind, so having the game play audio queues for what notes to hit and reading out menus is absolutely amazing, there are very few games with this many accessibility features that can be played by everyone. The world and story are also quite interesting. I'm an avid listener of EDM and I absolutely love the soundtrack. It's full of various genres from melodic house, 80's inspired synth pop and gritty trap. They all fit the gameplay perfectly and add to the experience.

I highly recommend this game!

Wow, this game is just awesome. I give the dev 10 stars if I could. The only thing I recommend is to have a way to reread the story on any mission, or at least have. a toggle. But this rocks. Thakns for the accessibility.. A review will be going up on my youtube later today.

Was looking for an extra reason to owning an arcade stick, and to improve my muscle memory. I browsed deep through steam's store page for a heavy execution rhythm game that was completely viable with arcade stick. This is it. The games I went through either halfway worked with arcade sticks, or not at all. This game is fully compatible. Note though, (as of the time of this review) your lever has to register as Left Control Stick, and not D Pad, as you cannot steer in boost mode. I had to use the "mode" button on my Qanba Obsidian to change it.

Best layout for arcade stick is:
Lever: Left=Move Left, Right=Move Right, Down=Wide Note, Up=Boost
Top Row: Orange Left, Orange Right, Blue Left, Blue Right
Bottom Row: Column 0, Column 1, Column 2, Column 3
You also do not need to bind a dedicated hyperdrift because tapping booster will activate hyperdrift.

As far as gameplay, you really do get your money's worth, if not more. This game will easily yield 50+ hours of gameplay, and more gameplay to come with the game's ability to create and download tracks. There's also a well thought out execution system. You can go from barely making a note on time to pressing it frame perfect for more points. It's not just get it right or wrong. I recommend going through tutorial, as I went straight to free mode and got completely lost on the orange and blue notes.

The racing aspect of the game works as well as it can with a rhythm game. Racing is really only choosing when to time your hyperdrifts and your boosts, and then steering correctly with those boosts. Other than that, you gain/lose speed, by how well you execute notes. Adrenaline fuels when you've hit high speed as notes have less screen time and the environment is flying by. There's also interesting quirks to make the game harder like steering around barriers and static charge build up, though they only appear in story mode. The story mode is also long and difficult which is huge plus for play value.

Though, the "RPG" aspect of the game isn't really rpg. Hell, you don't even get to choose the color of your ship. It's always gonna be red. The rpg they were referring to is the ability to spend the credits you've earned on ship parts that improve your rig in some way that suits your racing style or what style you need for a certain story mode missions. Betters boosters, better drifting, take less damage from missed notes. etc. There is no real personalization, if that's what you're expecting. The only good thing about this extra element in the game is that you can get creative on cutting down time on certain tracks because of how many turns there are vs straight tracks. Drifting upgrades vs booster upgrades. If you check the leaderboards for each song, everyone has their own build for the best time. Though eventually, people will figure out what are the best parts for each song/track. Also, this "rpg" element applies only to Time mode and not Score mode, as far as I know.

The soundtrack makes for a very intuitive gameplay. I've started on songs that, only until after I missed those notes, I am amazed I didn't hear that part of the song before. Also the other way around. I can feel where the song is going thus feeling how the notes will come out. The soundtrack is also very adrenaline inducing. Hitting the right notes when the bass drops is so satisfying. My favorite so far is Dublin on easy mode.

The music, the notes, and the rollercoaster tracks with the huge slopes right before a bass drop. All satisfying. Topped off with a huge replay value, custom tracks, and a competitive leaderboard. For 15$? In my opinion, that's a steal. I highly recommend with an arcade stick.

TL;DR Good experience and high difficulty ceiling, but level design has a tendency to rely on gimmicks that create difficulty spikes, especially once you reach Extreme difficulty/postgame. I'm about to nerd the **** out below, fair warning.


Let's just get this out of the way: it's an SDVX clone with keysounding(!!!) and a focus on visuals. The knob-twiddling mechanics have been translated into analog stick pushing, and charts are designed around that - fair warning to those using SDVX controllers, as some charts use chords of regular buttons AND both zigzags (the game's name for lasers), which is going to be difficult to execute. The game is simply best played on a Dualshock 4 IMO.

Music: It's all indie EDM stuff with some synth-pop licenses thrown in. Look up a couple videos on youtube and you'll know if it's your thing pretty quickly. Not a lot of "traditional rhythm game music" though with the addition of a Workshop that could change very quickly.

The single-player campaign mode comes with a few interesting mechanics. Boosting and drifting are decent ways to add another layer of depth to the levels, and tying ship speed and note velocity together is a novel way to complete the racing game theme. I'm a little worried that the "slowing down on corners" mechanic creates conflicting design goals, but even on the Challenge Mode version of the campaign you're never asked to optimize things to a ridiculous degree (if you're just trying to unlock Extremes anyways, some of the side missions get tough). UPDATE: Ultra difficulty Act 4, however, gets pretty intense since you're playing Extreme charts with additional objectives/gimmicks on top. By this point in the campaign, the idea of having to memorize key sections of the chart as a racing game parallel really comes through. Even if you've played a lot of SDVX, be prepared to drop the difficulty once you reach this section of the campaign.

Subjectively, the biggest con for me is that level design is hit or miss. Most of the levels are perfectly fine, but on Extreme difficulty the chart design tends to lean into uncomfortable patterns, or using the 3D track to obscure upcoming notes to squeeze out that last bit of difficulty. I could write an entire paper on why I disagree with this approach, but it ultimately comes down to differing design philosophies - the devs seem to be inspired by old school DDR and other games of the time period, where "that one bit of the level" was the way to make each song feel unique, and to be fair it still works. Modern rhythm games tend to look at things from the perspective of the player's hand/body movements and incorporate the unusual bits such that the spikes aren't as excessive and fit with the song - though there's always a place for the occasional gimmick level. Again though, this is ultra-subjective and most won't be bothered by this.

Visually, the 3D track is the single best tool the game has to really emphasize the flow of the song and get you immersed in the music. Unfortunately, everything else about the graphics fails to really pop for me. To be fair, the 2D art looks great and establishes a good aesthetic, and in-game everything is designed cleanly and doesn't get in the way of the level unless it's meant to. But something about the visual design in-game just falls a little flat for me. The game simply doesn't capture the synesthetic highs of Rez, Thumper, or Beat Saber, and I think there are a lot of relatively easy wins here that could take the experience to the next level.

So why am I recommending a game I seem to be bashing the **** out of? Well for one, I still played the darn thing for 50100+ (!!!) hours, so I guess they got quite a few things right. Good rebinding and calibration options + the option for tighter timing windows really tickles the score chasing bits of my brain. And despite the examples mentioned above, there aren't that many hardcore rhythm games that try to incorporate that sense of synesthesia. For what appears to be an extremely small dev team on a custom engine, there is a serious amount of work put into this - i think it's more that hardcore fans of the genre have grown to expect hardcore levels of polish thanks to studios with literal decades of experience, and in that context there's still a ways to go here. Thankfully, the devs seem committed to actively updating the game with new features and content, so time will tell if this passion pays off for them.

[ EDIT: Played it a good bit more, unlocked extreme mode finally! The extreme difficulty is on par with Sound Voltex/Kshoot's hardest difficulties (17+). If you are a veteran rhythm game player PLEASE do not look any further than this game. It has exactly what you are looking for in regards to difficulty. ]

Went in expecting to refund it, but now it definitely tops groove coaster and musynx for me. Musynx's lenient timing isnt ideal, and groove coaster has sync issues. This game has an engaging story, varied and punishing difficulties, great original music, and plenty of variety to choose from. On top of this, the game has many control options, many customizable settings, and well made beatmaps.

Would highly recommend! Can't wait for the level editor!

As a side note, the story is plenty long as I can tell. I am 6 hours in and only 20% complete it seems! This might be counting both difficulties tho, I am playing on challenging.

When Sound Voltex meets AudioSurf!

No really this game is a lot of fun! Can get really challenging though.

The Story isn't really engaging.. I feel like the devs can do better!
Besides that, the gameplay makes up for it with a great selection of music!

I really like it!