Cognitive control is a crucial prerequisite for goal-directed behavior: It ensures that one can act driven by one’s own intentions, even in conflict situations in which stimuli from the environment trigger conflicting behaviors. Cognitive control is influenced by urgency. In urgent situations, goal-driven behavior has been found to be temporarily overpowered by stimulus-driven behavior. Participants performed actions dictated by stimuli, even against their intentions. All previous studies investigated the effect of urgency on cognitive control in experiments with only two response alternatives. The number of response alternatives is a major determinant of reaction times and errors in manual cognitive tasks. Therefore, we ask whether an increase in response alternatives may influence how urgency affects cognitive control. Results revealed that the urgency-evoked dominance of stimulus-driven behavior is specific for tasks with two response alternatives. In contrast, when there are four response alternatives, the effect of urgency on cognitive control was severely reduced: Thus, increasing the task complexity in terms of response alternatives helps to maintain goal-driven behavior in the face of urgency.