What SEQUENCE STORM is
SEQUENCE STORM mixes rhythm play with racing and a story campaign. In the arcade you hit notes in time with the music, and in the racing mode hitting notes builds up speed and power, which you then spend on special abilities to pass the competition. The game supports 9-key, 5-key and 4-key layouts, and you can play on a keyboard, a gamepad or an arcade-style controller. There are 28 tracks in the arcade, each with 5 difficulty levels, so the same track can go from casual to insane depending on what you pick.
Playing together
Split screen is where the group comes in: you can challenge friends side by side on the same machine. Remote Play Together is supported, so people who are not in the same room can join in as well. The arcade tracks and their difficulty range give a group a shared set of songs to work through, and the racing mode gives a common goal to race toward rather than just comparing scores. Arcade leaderboards are there when you want to see how your runs stack up.
The story campaign
The campaign follows Elijah Gale across 28 missions with three difficulties. Elijah is an engineer who is down on his luck until he stumbles into a new career as a "daemon." The setting is a world where megacorporations use human minds to do their digital bidding inside The Sequence, where speed is the only thing that matters. You earn credits during the campaign and spend them upgrading Elijah's rig.
Before you start
The game is free-to-play, and the free package covers the 28 arcade tracks, the 28 story missions, 10 Trial Sequences, arcade leaderboards, the track editor and Steam workshop. Extra tracks, missions and customizations come from DLC, so check what is included before you plan a session around them. The tags mark the game as difficult, so expect a steep climb on the higher settings and start on a lower difficulty if your group is new to rhythm games. The track editor and Steam workshop mean custom levels are part of the mix alongside the built-in content.