Walkthrough Wednesday: “Deus Ex: Human Revolution”

It’s the eagerly anticipated game, and a contender for Game of the Year in many circles. But, if you’re not prepared, “Deus Ex” will hand you your head over, and over, AND OVER again. Don’t get mad: get augmented with our overview and our hand-picked best walkthroughs for this awesome game.

Overview

Here’s what you should know going in:

• Don’t walk in spoiling for a firefight: you will die. Especially on higher difficulties, charging in guns blazing is really the option of last resort. Enemies can kill you with just a few shots, although at least you can generally return the favor. While you’ll have the ammo to win short firefights and kill your enemies if you can’t avoid or stun them, Deus Ex is stingy with the bullets: you’re going to constantly be balancing the value of taking out enemies with one weapon versus another.
• Exploration is a good thing. Every goal in the game is designed to have several different paths in and several strategies that will work, and every mission hub in the game is full of secrets that you may not be able to find unless you poke around and ask questions. Basically, if you see something highlighted, you should check it out. Even just wandering through air vents can cough up useful XP. However, as you get further along in the game, you’ll find that without specific augments certain paths will be closed off to you.
• Everything saves: if you kill an enemy in an area, he stays dead and doesn’t respawn. It’s a welcome relief, about halfway through.
• While the game is pretty generous with the Praxis Points, what you need to unlock all your augments, it’s not so generous that you’re not going to have to make decisions. Some areas, like improving your hacking, are absolutely crucial; others are useless except in very specific situations.
• Hack, hack, hack. Not only does hacking everything you can find give you valuable experience points, meaning you get augments faster, it also offers up useful information: leads on sidequests, passcodes to doors you may not be able to crack, story information…oh, yeah, and lots and lots of jokes. The dev team had fun with this part of the game. Apparently, even in 2027, spam is still a huge problem, and some scams are eternal: when you play the game, you’ll see what we mean
• If you hack a security hub, don’t deactivate the cameras without getting the lay of the land. Oh, and if you’re not going for a perfect run, set the robots and turrets to “enemies”; it’ll mean there’s alarm, but it will also solve a lot of problems for you. Plus it’s hilarious.

Must Have Augments

The key thing about augs is this: you don’t absolutely need any particular aug. You’ll be able to finish every side mission and story mission even if you don’t bother to upgrade Adam Jensen at all. That said, it does make life easier, and many augs open up new paths.

Fully level your hacking, complete with robot and turret control. Also fully level your dermal armor: although you should be trying to avoid firefights, sometimes they’re unavoidable. Get your arm strength up to the second level, so you can lift dumpsters and other large objects, as soon as possible, and consider the wall breaking aug as soon as possible as well. Before you leave Detroit, definitely get the ability to fall from any height and land safely: it’ll make several missions about a thousand percent easier.

And, of course, max out your inventory, but be warned: the game throws enough stuff at you that you’ll be making choices about what you keep and what you don’t.

Beyond that, though, none of the augs are absolutely crucial, and some of them are fairly useless. For example, the rebreather aug is useful in the first boss fight, and for solving one or two puzzles, but those can be solved by some other aug as well. EMP hardening is useful in a few situations, but most of those come early on, well before you can uncork that particular trick. The stealth augs can be useful, but they’re frankly not necessary, although turning invisible is a lot of fun.

The worst is “Hacking” Analyze, though. Don’t waste Praxis Points on something the game does for you already.

How about you, readers? Any tips for getting through?