This is a big one. Nothing in it is a new place to go — it's the same twenty minutes, and it looks and sounds like a different game.
The city plays too
The pitch has always been that the city is the enemy. Mechanically it wasn't; it was furniture. You levelled, drew three, took one and compounded, and the city answered by spawning more things.
Now it drafts as well. At minute three, and every three and a half minutes after, the city takes something and keeps it. It never takes the same thing twice, and it never tells you what it took. A Streets run to the boss sees five picks, in an order your run's seed decides.
You won't get a banner. You'll notice the wave after it — whatever changed lands on the next one, not on the enemies already standing in front of you.
The horde stopped being one enemy in thirty-six colours
Every enemy was built out of axis-aligned rectangles — 32 of the 36 had a twin more than 70% the same shape — and the brightest thing on all of them was the same glowing disc: 387 of 630 pairs of those cores were more than 90% identical.
They've been rebuilt from the outline in — twenty-one hull families and ten core forms, each one gripped into its body rather than floating on it. Thirty-six distinct hull tints instead of one.
Core pairs above 90%: 387 to 6. Average silhouette overlap across the roster: 0.62 to 0.40. You can tell what's walking at you before it's close enough to matter.
It has recorded sound
Every sound in this game used to be a generated tone. 158 new sound files landed — weapons, kills, and the heavy cluster hit when a crowd goes down at once.
Six events stopped borrowing a neighbour's sound:
A destroyed prop announced itself with the boss stinger. A lamp post. Like a boss.
Falling and being beaten down were the same sound.
Using a door sounded exactly like gaining a level.
And four events the game was already firing had nothing listening at all — elite spawns, and the gatehouse, the Final Stand and the extraction of an Interchange run. The key beats of the whole second act happened in silence.
The Interchange has its own music
Eleven finished tracks were in the build and the game was never going to ask for one of them: it picked music by district, and a Deep Zone deliberately doesn't have one. The Interchange gets its full calm / assault / overdrive set and a boss theme.
Two audio bugs worth naming
Everything recorded was nine decibels too loud — the new cues arrived at full scale into a mix balanced around the quieter tones they replaced. Re-levelled against that set, not by ear.
Opening a menu played over its own soundtrack. Pausing stopped new sounds firing and never stopped what was already sounding. Every old cue was a tone under 200 ms, so nobody could hear it. The recordings are longer.
The Streets have traffic
Every car on the road was one grey rectangle. There are eight car bodies now, in thirty-two paints, with headlights taken from each design's own nose and the shadow cast from its actual panels. Black, grey and blue are three times likelier than any one bright colour, so the road reads as a city street and not as a toybox.
Things stand up
The view is still exactly overhead, but everything standing now casts a shadow from its own height — including the one archetype that flies, which had been casting the shadow of something stood on the floor.
And the telegraph stopped lying. A squashed warning circle over a round hitbox is wrong at its top and bottom edges. Every ground area in the game — hold zones, the blast paths, the flurry, gravity wells, the Cell magnet — took the same shape inside the simulation. Where the telegraph is drawn is now exactly where the damage is.
Your rounds look like your rounds
Eight projectile types were declared and two were drawn. Everything else, the Demolisher's rockets and grenades included, was firing the Courier's little gold dart under a different name. Four shapes and three tints cover the set now. Nothing you fire is orange, ever, because orange is what's being fired at you.
The menus are pictures
The main menu was nine identical rows and the stage selector six clipped rectangles in near-black. Every section now has its own metal and a picture of what it's for. Each district card is a top-down slice of that district — parked cars, an alarm and the crowd walking to it on the Streets, with the Interchange hanging underneath it three carriageways deep.
Fixes
The lag spikes around minutes six and seven are gone. Four enemy behaviours — the Overclocker, the Cover Projector, the Prism Drone and the Smoker — were each scanning every enemy on the field, every tick, once per copy of themselves. Four full sweeps of the horde per frame, at the exact moment the horde got big.
HOW TO PLAY was broken, and only in English. Eight rows printed raw key names. Every other language was fine.
The warning glow on a breakable prop was bigger than the prop. It was sized at 2.2x the prop's radius — a 75-pixel halo around a 34-pixel car, wider than the car itself, so it warned you about ground that was never going to hurt you. It's 1.5x now. Wrecked cars also sit under the street rather than floating on it.
Also: starting a fresh save could leave two card banks from the previous player's slot behind.