Countdown and pressure [KYL:TG]

I've come to a small kerfuffle while working on KYL:TG - the game isn't linear enough.

Usually in games the problem is that a game is too linear, but in my case it's the opposite. KYL:TG is supposed to feel like you're blasting through cops to get to your one goal - your landlord. But because the countdown is reasonably long, the player doesn't feel much of a need to go fast. Sometimes I would find myself even backtracking to get health, since all of the enemies are already gone.

So I had the idea of instead of the countdown starting out long, it rather starts out short and increases the more you progress. But in comes another problem - pressure. The main point of the countdown - at least "lore"-wise - is that the police conclude that sending in more cops to take you down is pointless and just hire a sniper to take down the player, instantly ending the game. The more time is wasted, the more aggressive and extreme the cops get. In other words - countdown and pressure are separate, but work together.

I've recently played Wolfenstein II : New Colossus and one thing that I really liked is the commander system. You have to sneak past Nazis and take down their commanders without getting caught, or else the commanders will fire an alarm, sending in more Nazis.

I wanna implement this sort of system into KYL:TG, but without the sneaking part, as that doesn't really fit. But the aspect of the commander being the main enemy I do like.

So here's my idea: Each section (there are 2 levels which are divided into sections) has a cop-commander-whoever, who has more health than a regular-old cop. If they're alive, tension increases more rapidly. If you kill one, you get armour, the countdown increases in time, the tension goes down a bit and cops stop spawning in the section, but the ones who were already there stay.