You earn XP for killing, sneaking, hacking, talking, completing objectives – anything you could call progress. A certain amount of XP gets you one Praxis point – basically a level up. You spend Praxis on upgrades for your augmentations: each has its own mini skill tree of possible improvements. Praxis is meant to represent the way Adam Jensen gets more effective with his cybernetic implants as he uses them – the word itself is likely a corruption of the word ‘practice’. Expect every review of the game to contain a box titled ‘Praxis makes perfect’.
Right now, the game shows 21 augmentations divided into lots of interesting categories: neural, visual, defence, physical, movement, offence, and sound. Each augmentation then has a few different ways it can evolve: the Hacking Device, a neural augmentation, initially only allows you to open locked doors once you’ve hacked a security terminal. An early upgrade lets you also control cameras, and two later ones enable you to mess around with turrets and robots respectively. Along the way, there are four other upgrades that make the hacking minigame easier, effectively letting you tackle better-defended terminals. Now if you’ll excuse me for a moment, I need to loosen my collar.
