Pragmata Brings a Thrillingly New Thought to Third-Particular person Shooters

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 gradual movement, cowl mechanics, and far 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 concept 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 filled with 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 capacity to hack parts of the bottom – together with these marauding robots.

Mixed, they develop into an extremely efficient unit – Hugh does the capturing, Diana does the hacking, and each are mixed as you play. Even the weakest enemies are lined in hard-to-penetrate armor, however after a fast hack, that armor will 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 goal your gun and hover the crosshair over an enemy, and a holographic grid puzzle seems on the correct of the display screen – 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 perhaps blockers, or further nodes that may be toggled to show the weakpoints for longer, that means you’ll should 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, fairly than a distraction from it. However, equally, no hacking puzzle felt overly complicated, that means I used to be by no means pissed off by having to finish it whereas additionally avoiding enemy assaults.

Taken altogether, and it’s a genuinely recent solution to strategy fight, and one which has big potential for the sport going ahead. My hands-on befell within the early elements of the sport, that 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 search out – and a few of that loot ties immediately into your hacking.

One consumable you’ll discover is Decode – for every pickup you could have, the following hack you carry out will add an additional sq. to the grid that makes your hack more practical in case you cross over it, however will get used up once 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 properly 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 be a extra cell character than you may anticipate from his cumbersome-looking armor – he’s geared up with thrusters that permit him sprint, increase into the air, and hover. One enemy kind 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 observe throughout a complete sport – even apart from the thriller surrounding them, there’s a humor and heat to their dialogue that lends Pragmata a lightness of contact at odds with its scientific, industrial world.

As a full package deal, this was the right 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.