Pragmata review – One of the most exciting new IPs in years

A brand new IP from Capcom, Pragmata wastes no time in letting you know it means business. One minute you’re landing on a lunar research facility with the rest of your investigation team, and the next, all hell is breaking loose. The result is that you, Hugh, are the only member of the team left alive. But it’s not long until you find yourself a companion for the long journey ahead. Diana is her name, an android presenting as a young child. And if you want to escape the lunar research facility, you’re going to have to work alongside her.

At the heart of Pragmata is a tale of AI gone wrong. The lunar research facility you’ve just landed on would normally be staffed by humans, but there are none present now. Instead there are just robots – a range of them, in fact – and they’re being used by a rogue AI to try and stop you in your tracks. Worse still, your weapons aren’t all that effective against them, al least not until Diana has hacked them to ‘open’ them up. You become pretty reliant on Diana, then, and so it’s no surprise that Hugh becomes pretty attached to her throughout his ordeal.

In gameplay terms, it means that Pragmata is more than just a third-person shooter. You can try shooting enemies without hacking them if you wish, but you’ll do very little damage. Instead, you need to target an enemy, then negotiate a grid using the four face buttons of your controller to hack them. Once hacked, an enemy becomes vulnerable for a period of time, giving you a precious opportunity to go on the offensive with your weapons, and target their weak points for massive damage.

It’s thanks to additional complexities that this hacking minigame laying at the core of Pragmata’s combat remains engaging and compelling from beginning to end. When hacking some enemies you’re presented with a grid that’s a different shape, for example. And then there’s the fact that the grid is littered with nodes, and moving through them before reaching the final hacking node causes a range of effects. There will always be nodes that keep enemies open for longer once they’re hacked, but depending on the nodes you’re carrying you might also be able to confuse enemies so they attack each other, or cause them to more easily overheat.

Having to both hack your enemies and shoot them to smithereens, this is a game where you need to both think and act fast. It’s a third-person shooter where every combat encounter becomes a puzzle, and where having a strategy can really pay dividends. If you have a group hack node in your possession, for example, you’ll want to avoid it when hacking if you’re facing off against just one enemy, or it’ll be wasted. When facing off against multiple foes, though, you might want to use it to open up multiple of them at once.

Strategy needs to be considered when it comes to the weapons at your disposal as well. You always have a primary weapon at your disposal, the ammo of which regenerates over time. You can also carry a range of additional weapons, each focused on either offense, utility or defence. Find yourself up against a large number of enemies? Switch over to the Riot Gun if you’re carrying one and you’ll be able to knock them all down for a short while. Alternatively, if you’re up close and personal with a single powerful foe you might want to switch over to the Shockwave Gun, which is essentially a shotgun. There are even opportunities to use the environment to your advantage, at which point the Decoy Generator becomes particularly useful.

Add in a rewarding evasive manoeuvre using the thrusters of Hugh’s spacesuit, and combat feels fantastic in Pragmata, with bosses and other large encounters being a real highlight. But there’s also more to it. Outside of combat, there are puzzles to solve using your hacking skills, and exploration is rewarded by a wide range of upgrades and currencies to make both Hugh and Diana more powerful and versatile. There’s even some platforming to be done, and some of the areas you visit have an almost Soulslike element to their design with you opening up surprising shortcuts.

On the subject of Soulslikes, there are other elements here that are familiar to that sub-genre, too, such as enemies in an area respawning upon you seeking respite in a shelter, accessed by hatches you’ll frequently encounter. Pragmata is also quite a challenging game, though multiple difficulty levels are available so you don’t have to find yourself at an impasse. Still, for those who rise to the occasion, once the credits have rolled, which is likely to take 10 to 15 hours depending on how thorough you search the game’s environments for upgrades and collectibles, an additional Lunatic difficulty becomes available, as well as other modes that add additional content and replayability.

With it being a new IP, I didn’t know what to expect from Pragmata. And during its early hours, I wondered if the hacking minigame might quickly become repetitive. But this never happened. The drip feed of new weapons, hacking nodes and other gameplay mechanics mean that this is a game that truly keeps you invested from beginning to end, with you always having something new to play with. Coupled with a story which you’ll be eager to experience, and plenty of reasons to the return to the game, and Capcom’s gamble has well and truly paid off.