Deus Ex: Human Revolution Hints

Challenge Mode Tips

• Once you've played through the game a few times and gotten familiar with it, it can be fun to play it through again in challenge mode. There's no official challenge mode feature in-game, so you'll have to come up with your own challenge and restrict yourself to its rules. Some possibilities are given below.
  
  * Max the Prax => This challenge requires you to get as many Praxis points as possible. You'll have to buy all the Praxis kits from the L.I.M.B. clinics, find all the Praxis kits that are hidden in secret areas, do all the side quests that get you Praxis kits as rewards, and get the most XP possible. Those first three things are pretty easy to accomplish, but the fourth one isn't. Max XP requires you to do all optional objectives and side quests, hack every single device that's hackable, use takedown moves on everyone that gets you XP for doing so, find all the XP-giving ebooks, and all other sorts of tedium. The Reflex Booster augmentation makes this particularly troublesome, since you essentially lose 45 XP every time you take two enemies down individually instead of herding them together for a double takedown. And if anyone sees you while you're herding them together, you'll lose out on the area's Ghost XP bonus. This challenge is for *truly* hardcore sneak-a-holics only.
  
  * Read My Lips: No New Augmentations => This challenge forbids you to ever spend any Praxis points to buy new augmentations or upgrades. (You can't even buy inventory upgrades to carry more stuff. Sorry!) Fortunately, the game makes it possible to do all of the main missions without any upgrades. You can also do all of the side quests without upgrades if you have the "Explosive Mission Pack" DLC and use its automatic unlocking devices on the items you need to hack that have a security level of 2 or higher.
  
  * Ghost in the Deus Ex Machine => This challenge goes way beyond just getting the Ghost XP bonus every time it's available. You'll have to make it through the entire game without taking down even one enemy at any point. Also, you must never use any weapons or explosives of any kind for any reason, even if no enemies are around to hear them. (Note that the four boss battles are the only exceptions to this.) Whether or not it's okay to use security hub computers to shut down security devices is up to you, but no non-boss humans must ever be injured, killed, or knocked unconscious due to any action you take. Furthermore, they must never detect you to the extent that they turn hostile. (A brief alarmed state is okay, unless you want to make the challenge harder by avoiding even that in areas where enemies aren't automatically alarmed.) If you find that an optional area or side quest is making it too hard to abide by this challenge's rules, like if it requires you to take someone down, you may have to skip it. (But skip as little as possible to maximize the challenge.)
  
  * Sergeant Slaughter => This challenge requires you to kill every single enemy in the game. By "enemy," I mean anyone who would turn hostile if they saw you, either with or without warning you off first. You can use any means of killing them, including guns, explosives, lethal takedown moves, throwing heavy objects, hacking security hubs and turning their turrets and robots against them, and so on. It's also okay to knock enemies unconscious with things like gas grenades and non-lethal takedowns as long as you kill them before moving on. (Note that exceptions can be made for Double-T on the "Cloak & Daggers" side quest in Part 2, and the street thugs in the "Corporate Warfare" side quest in Part 6.) You can modify the challenge to include killing as many enemies as possible with friendlied-up robots and turrets, destroying all security devices in enemy territory (after using them against the enemy, preferably), and/or killing all non-enemies that you can get away with killing.
  
  * No Time to Kill => This is the traditional "speedthru" challenge, where you only care about making it through the game in as little time as possible (not counting pause time). It doesn't matter how often you're seen, or anything else. Put the cybernetic pedal to the metal!
  

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