There's a city under the city
Kill the PRIME Warden and the ground opens.
THE GATE IS OPEN. Take it and you go down into the Interchange — a whole second act underneath District 1, with its own Warden, its own landmarks, and no way back up once you commit. There's a gatehouse on the way in: you get staged, healed and handed a draft before the door shuts, because what's down there does not care that you just killed a boss.
Then you hold. Survive the Final Stand and you extract with Cores. Don't, and the run ends down there.
This is the biggest thing in the demo and it's the last thing you'll find, which is the right way round. It isn't a menu option and you can't skip to it — the only way in is through the boss at minute 18. Earn it once and the game will offer you the short route afterwards.
Right-click does something
Both survivors have a Tactical now, on a cooldown.
The Demolisher throws a breaching charge. It arcs out across the street, sticks for a beat, then takes a wide bite out of whatever was standing there and shoves the rest. Twelve seconds between throws.
The Courier drops a beacon. It pulls the crowd onto it for three seconds, every nine, and it does no damage whatsoever. What it does is decide where the fight happens — which, for a survivor built around not getting hit, turns out to be the same thing as winning it.
Two Commons build into it: Quick Release shortens the wait, Wide Pattern makes it cover more ground.
Going down isn't the end of your run
Bleed out with nobody to pick you up and you don't get a results screen any more.
You leave a husk where you fell — your colour, your seat, still standing — and the run carries on without you. A teammate can extract you. So can a bot, which now treats a husk as something to go and get rather than as scenery. Killing the district boss brings everyone back on its own.
You can read it at a glance: AWAITING EXTRACTION while you're waiting, RE-FORMING while somebody's working on it. And a dead seat has stopped drawing itself as a living one, which sounds like nothing and is the difference between knowing how the party is doing and guessing.
Playing alone, this mostly means a bad thirty seconds at minute fourteen costs you the rest of the run instead of all of it.
The crowd looks like a crowd
It used to be one enemy photocopied several hundred times.
Now they come in real chassis with different silhouettes, and they're dressed for where they are — the machines on the Streets look like they belong on the Streets. The thing deciding what spawns got rebuilt around keeping the mix varied instead of hitting a budget number, so minute fifteen doesn't look like minute three with more of it.
There's one rule underneath all of it: you should be able to tell what's coming at you from its outline alone, before you can read a single detail on it.
Cards
Thirteen new cards you can actually draw, and twenty-six of the ones already in the demo have changed.
The pool got audited, hard, and it did not come out of it well. Fifteen cards did nothing at all — their text promised something the game never applied. They work now. Twelve pairs turned out to be the same card under two names. Every pair has been pulled apart, so a draft offers you three real choices instead of two and an echo.
The new Commons are mostly the front door to builds that didn't exist before:
Scrap Charge — the city's cars and condensers hit harder and wider. Shoot the street, not the crowd.
Backdraft and Cold Read — you hit burning machines and slowed machines harder. Fire stopped being a second damage source and became a setup for your actual gun.
Adrenal Dump — you hit harder the closer you are to dying.
Patch Bay — everything the city does on your behalf hits harder.
Override Key — whatever you switch on stays on longer.
Arc Bridge and Jumper Lead — lightning reaches further and jumps to more things.
Rarities were re-tuned across the board too, so a Legendary isn't a Common with a bigger number on it.
Other things you'll run into
Split-screen. Local co-op for two to four can run split-screen. It's off by default — turn it on in Options. Everyone gets their own camera, HUD, draft dock and prompts, and teammates off the edge of your view show up as arrows.
The ground is a material. Concrete reads as wet concrete now, close up and pulled back, without touching the colours that keep the crowd readable.
Controller prompts show the right buttons for the pad you're actually holding.
Your health bar moves instead of jumping, and the heal marker is legible against the pickup sitting next to it.
Everyone regenerates a trickle of health, so a scratch at minute two isn't permanent for the next eighteen.
A downed player lights the ground around them again.
Fixes
Standing in a big enough crowd could make you effectively invulnerable. That was the worst bug in the build. It's gone.
The bullet holes from the last update were landing on every kill. If you played after 30 August and wondered why the floor turned into a colander about ninety seconds in, that's why. Two events inside the game had been handed the same id number, so every enemy that died was punching a wall-impact decal into the ground. The same mix-up threw XP motes off walls when you missed, and made two dropped Cells merging look like a small gravity well. One bug. All of it fixed.
Also: bots have stopped getting stuck on small props, a stage could load seven hazard families where it wanted one, and crash logs are written and kept now — so if it does fall over, we can read why instead of guessing.
Get to the bottom of the Interchange and that's the demo done. It's a good place to stop. Wishlist SCRAPSTORM if you want the rest of the city.