The third-person shooter style is a wealthy lineage, with builders constructing on the “proper” solution to mix gunplay, exploration, and puzzle-solving over the course of many years. We’ve seen these video games undertake sluggish movement, cowl mechanics, and rather more, usually iterating on their friends to evolve over time. However that additionally means it’s very uncommon to see a brand new sport within the style pop up with an thought I’ve merely… by no means seen earlier than. Enter, Pragmata.
Playable for the primary time at Summer season Sport Fest 2025, Capcom’s long-awaited sport lastly confirmed off what it’s all about – and on the coronary heart of all of it was a gameplay mechanic that feels legitimately new.
Pragmata sees you controlling two characters directly: Hugh is an astronaut, stranded in a Lunar base full of seemingly malfunctioning automata; Diana is a mysterious android within the type of a kid, who saves Hugh and promptly piggybacks on his armored spacesuit, providing her skill to hack parts of the bottom – together with these marauding robots.
Mixed, they turn out to be an extremely efficient unit – Hugh does the capturing, Diana does the hacking, and each are mixed as you play. Even the weakest enemies are coated in hard-to-penetrate armor, however after a fast hack, that armor may be opened up and weakpoints uncovered. In follow, it implies that each single enemy in Pragmata isn’t only a goal – they’re a puzzle.
Maintain down the left set off to purpose your gun and hover the crosshair over an enemy, and a holographic grid puzzle seems on the appropriate of the display – your job is to information your cursor throughout the grid (utilizing the face buttons as directional inputs) to a goal sq., at which level Diana will full the hack. Alongside the way in which there is likely to be blockers, or additional nodes that may be toggled to show the weakpoints for longer, which means you’ll have to be strategic and environment friendly.
The important thing right here is in how well-balanced this technique is – the sport doesn’t cease or decelerate as you’re hacking, turning every puzzle into a real a part of the motion loop, relatively than a distraction from it. However, equally, no hacking puzzle felt overly advanced, which means I used to be by no means annoyed by having to finish it whereas additionally avoiding enemy assaults.
Taken altogether, and it’s a genuinely contemporary solution to strategy fight, and one which has enormous potential for the sport going ahead. My hands-on happened within the early elements of the sport, which means enemy hacks have been pretty primary, however even right here there have been nuances. Ranges are tightly packed knots of corridors and wider arenas, with loot and lore to seek out – and a few of that loot ties straight into your hacking.
One consumable you’ll discover is Decode – for every pickup you could have, the subsequent hack you carry out will add an additional sq. to the grid that makes your hack more practical for those who go over it, however will get used up if you do. It begins making you ask the query: do I have to make this enemy simpler to defeat, or ought to I save this for later?
As you’d hope, the normal gunplay round all of this innovation is effectively thought-out, too. Whereas I solely had the chance to check out a couple of weapons in my time with the sport, there’s greater than sufficient to pique curiosity right here. For a begin, after the anticipated pistol and shotgun variants, the third weapon I acquired was a Stasis Internet, a gun that fires out an area-of-effect projectile that slows and shocks something inside – excellent for firing off right into a crowd earlier than starting my hacks, earlier than switching to apunchier weapon to complete them off. There additionally seems to be a degree system for weapons, presumably letting you swap in higher variations of the identical weapons as you discover them.
Hugh can also be a extra cellular character than you would possibly anticipate from his cumbersome-looking armor – he’s outfitted with thrusters that allow him sprint, increase into the air, and hover. One enemy sort will smash the bottom to ship out a shockwave, which necessitates you pondering vertically in addition to laterally – a sort of pondering extra acquainted from platformers than shooters.
And on the coronary heart of all of it, Hugh and Diana already really feel like a genuinely attention-grabbing dynamic to comply with throughout a complete sport – even except for the thriller surrounding them, there’s a humor and heat to their dialogue that lends Pragmata a lightness of contact at odds with its medical, industrial world.
As a full bundle, this was the proper solution to reintroduce a sport first introduced way back to 2020 – Pragmata has moved from being a curiosity, firmly into my most-anticipated checklist.
Pragmata involves Xbox Collection X|S in 2026.
