The Best Deus Ex Augmentations

If you could upgrade your senses by having a chip inserted into your brain, or make yourself stronger by having your arms upgraded or your back covered in armour, would you do it? What if it meant you were dependent on a lifetime of expensive drugs to stop your body rejecting the changes? And what if it meant you had to fly around the world hiding behind boxes and hacking into people's email?

For Adam Jensen, head of security at Sarif Industries and the protagonist of the excellent Deus Ex: Human Revolution, this isn't even a choice. He's brutally attacked at the start of the game and has to be augmented to save his life, and spends most of the rest of the game investigating why. (He doesn't have to hack into everyone's email, actually, but in our hands he couldn't help himself.)

By now you've probably made a good deal of headway in Human Revolution, if not actually completed it, and you've probably acquired up a bunch of augmentations using Praxis Points earned by gathering XP or bought at LIMB clinics. Having finished it several times through, we've used pretty much all of them, so we thought we'd run through our favourites and what they brought to the email-hacking party.

Cloaking System

When we first started playing Human Revolution, we refused to get our hands dirty. We refused even to be seen. As such, we became very familiar with the game's loading screen, and spent a lot of time sat bathed in its orange glow, waiting to respawn behind a fridge and have another go at sneaking through a Chinese gangster's apartment without being detected.

Stealth feels like the purest way to play the game, and if you want to get good at it you probably want the obvious tools first, like being able to see enemy cones of vision. But rather than max all those out - wasting Praxis Points on being able to see your last-known-position during an alarm state, for example - get yourself a cloak.

A fully upgraded invisibility shield gives you nearly 10 seconds of total anonymity per segment of your energy bar, allowing you to move almost freely across large areas. By the time you're crawling through some of Heng Sha's nastier districts that could be the difference between perfect stealth and - gnrnrngh - raising Suspicion among cameras, robots and henchmen.

Hacking: Capture - Robot Domination

Then again, there's a difference between being seen in plain sight - clearly a badge of dishonour - and making your presence felt from the shadows. You'll probably hack into a fair few computers that let you deactivate security cameras and after a while they will also include references to security robots and turrets, but you won't be able to do anything with them.

As well as sounding like a late-generation PS2 game in a Japanese RPG series, "Hacking: Capture - Robot Domination" changes that. Robots in Human Revolution can be the little droid guys who look a bit like mobility scooters with mounted machineguns, but they can also be massive, stompy adversaries who look like Arsenal Gear from Metal Gear Solid and will kill you in seconds, so being able to disable them, and knowing that being spotted won't mean auto-death, is a boon.

The other option, of course, is to change their targeting from "Default" to "Enemies", altering their priorities somewhat. Then all you have to do is stride past them and pick up the pieces of anyone who is left over.