Dylan wakes up to find his cell open and his chest actually impaled by the shape-shifting melee weapon, the Aberrant, that he’s apparently been granted by his sister and the FBC’s resident governing body/extradimensional cosmic horror, The Board, which addresses him directly in their signature, fourth-wall-breaking, alien rumble: “You will serve as intern/player character/lackey.”

Reaching to pull it out, I faced the first choice of the game between three different melee weapons: Flurry (fast-attacking, close-range twin daggers with a boosted critical chance), Slash (a wide-swiping scythe for attacking groups), and Slice (a high-single-target-damage axe with bonus damage from behind, which is what I went with).

These kinds of substantive mechanical choices do a lot to immediately separate CONTROL Resonant from the first game. Jesse’s kit opened up and allowed for specialization over time, but broadly played the same no matter what. With Dylan, on the other hand, I was making significant build choices right away. You can unlock the other weapons eventually and experiment more, but the game immediately starts getting you used to the idea of mutually exclusive choices.

Dylan steps out of his cell to find the Oldest House on high alert, with alarms blaring and no other living people anywhere to be found. A handful of bureau employees infected by the Hiss (the infecting alien force Jesse fought (and apparently ultimately failed) to contain in the first game) are stumbling around to serve as tutorial fodder for me to learn the basics of attacking and dodging. Emerging from the front door, Dylan finds Manhattan to be in similarly rough shape to the Oldest House – apparently, the Hiss has fully escaped.

A radio on one of the floating bodies chirps out a distress call that Dylan answers. FBC agent Zoe is extremely relieved to make contact with anyone, even if Dylan is understandably cagey at first about his identity, and she directs him towards her. I then begin to fight my way through the apocalyptic streets and alleys of NYC.

In one of these alleys, I face off against my first larger enemies, towering above with giant heads that they smash down on me. A wall blocks my advancement until I clear the impromptu arena of the larger threats, with smaller, basic enemies respawning continually in the meantime. It requires a bit more situational awareness than the previous fight to make sure Dylan isn’t hit from behind, which is just a taste of things to come.

After this I am presented with another set of three choices for my secondary weapon: Crush (a huge, slow, smashing mallet), Drill (a directed, sustained damage weapon), and Extend (a whip-like chain staff for range, which I chose to complement the close-up damage of Slice).

Eventually you also choose from a third pool of weapons for combo-finishers. That means that you mix and match your main move set from a different set of weapons each for light, heavy, and finishers attacks. Combine the heavy mallet smashes of Crush with the rapid attacks of Slash, and you’ve more or less built your own Kirkhammer.

One element that hadn’t occurred to me before playing was how much CONTROL Resonant is also a 3D platformer. Making my way up to some rooftops, I see one of the demo’s more striking images: a sort of ribbon of hundreds of pigeons stuttering frozen midair and spiraling down toward a doorway. I make my way over to it and enter to find a sort of pocket dimension of plant-covered building tops in a black void.

Following an impression of his sister Jesse, Dylan finds a number of what look like 16-bit game consoles that unlock movement abilities like a dash, double jump, and levitation, followed by platforming challenges to tutorialize the new skill before adding another. It culminates after he re-emerges into the city with a little test where he leaps and dashes over the biggest gaps yet to reach the first boss, a Resonant Entity.

According to Zoe, Manhattan was already under assault by another Altered World Event before the Hiss even escaped the Oldest House, compounding the situation. The Hiss and this Resonant AWE seem to be at odds with one another, at least, as we observe the Resonant Entity removing all Hiss from its surroundings from a distance.On reaching it, the Entity itself takes the form of an enormous woman’s head, cut off at the mouth and embedded in a slab of pavement, telekinetically picking up rocks and garbage to throw at me. It was unsettling and spectacular, which is exactly the intersection where I want a CONTROL boss fight to sit.

I scrape through on the first attempt and am given my third and final build choice of the demo: one of three options for a Resonant special ability. These were Barrage (pulling up rocks from the ground to launch at range), Seekers (summoning a sort of auto-firing turret that you can also throw as an explosive), and Shield (pulling up a shield of floating rocks that you can also use offensively by dashing into enemies). You will eventually have three of these equipped at any given moment, giving you a full suite of six unique attacks and abilities that you can build and tweak à la carte. That’s a huge amount of variety even before you take into account the skill trees for each of those weapons with which you can further customize them, or passive abilities you can equip from artifacts that you craft.

I was able to take a sip directly from this firehose of complexity when I jumped to a later save file when Dylan has a full suite of abilities unlocked. The Evacuation Zone is an open combat area, filled with various types of enemies coming from all sides, both melee and ranged. It was a lot to juggle, and Dylan’s expanded kit was overwhelming to take in when jumping ahead like that, rather than building it up incrementally like you will in the normal course of play. It’s good, though – the fact that I wasn’t able to just button-mash my way through the later gameplay section means there will be some real skill to master, which is exciting in the context of all this deep build variety and room for experimentation.