Pragmata review: "Blasting and hacking in sync has me locked in – Capcom's sci-fi shooter stands strong alongside Resident Evil"

Pragmata is the gimmicky gift that keeps on giving. I keep one eye on my hacking matrix at all times, the other on the renegade robot foes slowly closing in. An aerial attacker locks onto me, priming its laser beams, and I dodge out of the way at the very last moment. I can't fight back yet. Not without hacking the robots first, bashing the face buttons on my DualSense to plot a path to a green completion node before I get blasted to pieces.

Some nodes I pass through cause the machines to overheat. Others open them up to a devastating critical shot, complete with arcade-y slow-motion animations as damage numbers explode overhead. But none of it would be possible without a small android child who's turned the back of my space suit into her very own sniper's nest, and she's really the star of the show.

Mega...child?

In the yawning black hole of sci-fi action shooters, Pragmata offers a rare ray of light. There's something distinctly old-school about its visuals: the clean monochromatic paneling of the lunar base gives me flashes of Mass Effect, while my partner immediately notes similarities to 2013's Remember Me when I enter the New York-themed biome. But its dual hacking and shooting mechanic is what makes it truly stand out, and having finished Pragmata in just over 12 hours, I was charmed enough to head back in for New Game Plus immediately.

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Pragmata begins with protagonist Hugh arriving at a lunar research facility owned by his employer, the Delphi corporation. Here, lunum ore is mined for use in lunafilament 3D printers, mysterious new machines capable of printing anything from entire buildings to weapons in the blink of an eye.

The base is curiously deserted, though, and Hugh soon finds himself at the mercy of a rogue AI named IDUS who seems hell-bent on his destruction. It's lucky he runs into a child-like android, nicknamed Diana – her real product name is a string of numbers – who explains that she is a prototype of something called a Pragmata.

Between Hugh's arsenal of 3D-printed weapons and Diana's sharp hacking skills, they make the ultimate dream team against IDUS' rogue machinery.

New gun types can be discovered as you play through each of Pragmata's five biomes on a push to get back to Earth, each created by a different designer who were lazy enough to give their respective AI systems free rein to draw up blueprints. One biome resembles New York City, for example, while the Terra Dome is an AI's rendition of what it thinks a deep winding forest might look like. The result is a complex network of locked passages and chambers that, while connected by a tram system, are otherwise very complex to maneuver. They weren't designed with humans in mind, after all.

No matter where the duo goes on their mission, IDUS rallies robot troops to fend off the hostile attackers. Hugh handles the firepower, but guns would be useless without Diana, who must hack into each robot's system to make them vulnerable to damage in the first place. The combination is one that has my brain immediately locked in, my focus suddenly razor sharp as I do two things at once nearly all of the time.

Whether influenced by the TikTok generation's infamous lack of attention span or just a fun new mechanic, I'm not sure. But for someone with ADHD, Pragmata feels like a video game's answer to Ritalin, and the controls are smart and reflexive enough that even those with ample dopamine should fall into an easy flow state with it.

As I move through the biomes, each culminating in a dramatic boss fight, the weapons system deepens. I always have access to one primary unit – a Grip Gun pistol at first, followed by the machine-gun-like Pulse Carbine later in the game – which reloads automatically. Loadouts can be customized (and suit health restored) before setting out from Shelter, as close to a Resident Evil-style save room as you're going to get on this space base – though unlike decaying zombies, each time you leave robots have been redeployed.

Atop my primary unit, I have Attack, Tactical, and Defense units to pick from – the powerful Shockwave Gun (aka shotgun) is my personal favorite, as are the Homing Missiles, a Decoy Gun, and my handy Riot Blaster for knocking down groups of bots when I need a little crowd control.

There is a catch, though: all weapons save for my primary unit will break after the last round is fired – they're 3D-printed, okay? – meaning I'll be picking up new weapons while exploring.

Hacking works similarly. Each hacking node has a number of charges, signifying how many times it will show up in a matrix before being disabled, freeing up a slot for Hugh to pick up new hacks along the way, and combining confluent nodes and mode chips allows me to build a powerful Overheat strategy to open up my enemies to those powerful critical hits I mentioned earlier.

Gotta catch 'em all

That said, Pragmata's many resource currencies can feel a bit overengineered. There's lunafilament for weapons, pure lunum for high-tier weapon and ability upgrades, upgrade components for firmware like suit toughness and hacking damage boosts, data shards (I still don't know what these do), red gate keys to access challenging arenas with valuable loot, and finally Cabin Coins.

Cabin Coins, given to a friendly bot at the Shelter whose name just happens to be Cabin, are traded for stamps I can place on one of five bingo sheets. Each bingo square nets you a prize, from sweet new threads for both Hugh and Diana to duller robot data you can read in the Bot Database. Get a bingo, a triple bingo, or a full sheet blackout, and you get extra tasty prizes – as long as you're game for a bit of a Cabin Coin grind, of course.

There are multiple ways to earn Cabin Coins: I find them while exploring the biomes, earn them from completing training simulations and meeting certain winning conditions, or have them awarded to me after gifting Diana some Read Earth Memories.

REMs are dotted throughout the biomes, 3D-printed toys and other means of entertainment for use in Shelter to help Diana learn more about what life is like for human children back on Earth. These gifts mark an important step in building the duo's bond. I love seeing how happy the little android gets with each new present as new dialogue gets unlocked, and every so often, she even draws Hugh a picture of them both as a little thank-you.

Chatting with Diana between missions is one of my favorite ways to unwind at Shelter, and is a beautiful way for Capcom to illustrate their growing mutual fondness as the story progresses. You can even play hide and seek with her eventually, and, for a rookie, she is unnecessarily good at it.

I adore Diana so much that I made it my mission to find all the REMs in the game. Luckily, it's very easy to do that. Each time I choose a tram stop, a menu comes up to tell me which collectibles I've yet to discover in each section of a chosen biome.

My only gripe with this system is that even when I upgrade Diana's scan ability to locate collectibles on the map, the game's clunky pathing and lack of minimap makes it hard to actually find my way to many of them.

It speaks to one of the game's more outdated features, frequently leading me on a wild goose chase or five. Collectibles aren't pinpointed on the larger blueprint map, either, so it's a case of hammering the scan button on my controller and looking about frantically. Even if you don't aim to 100% each and every biome, seeing the collectibles pop up when scanning to find your objective marker makes them nearly impossible to ignore, cluttering the HUD in a way that made me want to find each and every one just to cut that visual noise.

And yet, even as I traipse back out to the glitchy streets of not-quite New York for another round of hide-and-seek with a loot box, I'm loving my time with Pragmata. By combining punchy third-person shooter action with tense matrix puzzles that have my brain firing on all cylinders, Capcom has created an intensely engaging and absorbing action-adventure that feels tailor-made for 2026.

Whether you come away with a redoubled fear of the future of AI or a newfound wish to adopt your own little android daughter is yours to find out – though my own daily ritual of popping in for a chat with Diana each morning probably speaks for itself.

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