SEQUENCE STORM Reviews

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.

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.

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!

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.

[h1] Intro [/h1] 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. [h1] The Gameplay [/h1] 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. [h1] The Controls [/h1] 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. [h1] The Campaign [/h1] 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. [h1] Arcade Mode [/h1] 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. [h1] The Track Editor [/h1] 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. [h1] The DLC [/h1] 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. [h1] Conclusion [/h1] Get the game. Its fun and its free.

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

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.

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). [b]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.[/b] 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 [i]occasional[/i] 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 [strike]50[/strike]100+ (!!!) 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.

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!

[ 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.