Pragmata Review: A Retro-Style Shooter With a Hacking Twist

Pragmata feels like a game straight from the Xbox 360 era in the best way possible. It is the kind of third-person action-shooter that hangs its hat on a specific gimmick but then plays everything else fairly straightforward. By executing on the important parts really well, Pragmata is able to let its punchy shooting, creative hacking mechanic, and tough fights do the heavy lifting. The storytelling around that stuff isn't exactly its strong suit, even with how much it emphasizes its budding father-daughter dynamic, but Pragmata is focused on the action first. That part is so compelling and satisfying that I didn't even think twice about 100%-ing the campaign.

A Rogue AI Turns the Tables

Something I appreciate about Pragmata is that it doesn't really waste time getting you in the flow once it starts. A brief intro gives you just enough to understand Hugh, the main protagonist, before a rogue AI turns the Moon's space station and endless supply of robots against his crew. This leaves him as the lone survivor in a desperate struggle for survival.

There is a brief conversation about how the crew's company resorts to 3D printing at an unfathomably massive scale to fabricate most of what exists on the Moon. The narrative suggests it is easier for them just to reprint infrastructure than actually maintain it properly, establishing a sensible premise for the rest of the roughly 12-hour campaign. While the overall story doesn't explore this world-building with much depth, it quickly pivots to the truth about a humanoid robot girl named Diana. She becomes Hugh's partner in crime, handling the hacking while he takes care of the shooting, and this is where Pragmata truly shines.

The Hacking Mechanic That Defines Combat

Hacking happens in real-time whenever you aim down sights, asking you to solve a grid-based pathing puzzle by drawing a route from one point to another using the face buttons on a controller. Successful hacks expose enemy weak spots and make them susceptible to real damage. This is Pragmata's marquee feature, and there is no avoiding it since enemies are basically impenetrable otherwise without these digital breaches.

The more "Open" blue spaces you include in your route, the longer enemies stay vulnerable. The yellow "Nodes" you have equipped will pop up on the grid at random, which tack on additional status effects like:

  • Spreading hacks to nearby robots
  • Increasing damage potency
  • Turning robots against each other

Tougher enemies and bosses feature more complex grids with obstacles that can block or sabotage your hack. So not only do you need to keep an eye on the battlefield to dodge imposing foes and keep them in your field of view, but you also need eyes on the hack to solve it as quickly as possible. Juggling the two broke my brain at times, and as frustrating as it might get when more enemies are thrown at you, finding a smarter approach made the hardest fights conquerable and intrinsically rewarding.

Weaponry That Packs a Punch

The shooting just feels good, too – between the shotgun and charge rifle, landing a direct shot on a robot's weak spot has a satisfying weight and feedback to it. The grenade launcher clears crowds with authority and the stasis net can buy you much needed time to execute a hack, hit a clutch shot, or just reposition. Once I unlocked the automatic rifle to replace the pea-shooter pistol, I took every opportunity to let the chopper sing, so long as I could control the wild recoil from its beefy shots.

It is sometimes an annoyance to deal with the "heat" buildup on the pistol and rifle, but I found continually swapping weapons between cooldown periods to be an effective way to get more out of the great gunplay. These weapons are categorized in your loadout, so you can't just take everything with you. While there are numerous other options with varying functions, I dug my heels in with a weaponset that was both effective and fun as hell to work with.

The heavy weapons have limited ammo, however, so there is a degree of scavenging for guns that you'll have to do in the middle of a fight. This leads to neat moments of adapting to the situation, but more often than not, I wanted to get that sweet finisher on enemies. Certain weapons and hacking with specific nodes drives up a stagger meter, and if you can fill it, you're rewarded with an execution that comes with a quick camera cut and a nice, big damage number.

Level Design and Replayability

Some of the ways Pragmata harkens back to old-school design principles also comes from its level design. They are fairly linear with plenty of rewards, resources for upgrades, and bits of storytelling in datapads and holograms to find off the beaten path. This often asks you to search the environment for hidden paths to those goodies, and it is pretty sick seeing Diana rip a data vape to expand her ultimate meter.

Oftentimes, tight corridors lead to open spaces for combat arenas in a predictable rhythm that largely works, though it does get somewhat repetitive toward the end of the campaign. As impressive as Pragmata can look at times, I did get pretty worn out by how frequently you're fighting within the confines of sterile space station walls. Even still, I was happy to retread levels to pick up all the collectibles when I unlocked the ability to access certain areas for the love of the game and to max out the levels on my favorite abilities and gear.

Pragmata doesn't really push above and beyond the cadence it establishes in its early hours, but at least I knew I had intense combat encounters waiting for me at a brisk pace. The hack-and-shoot formula absolutely rules, and I hope Capcom builds on those ideas in the future.