[SGF hands-on] Pragmata is welcomingly familiar, and its gameplay hook is great

Pragmata brings us back to an era of comfort food action gaming — in spaaaace

It’s 2010. I’m standing in line at E3 to play the latest upcoming space shooter. The controls are loose, but good. There is great locomotion. There’s a neat gimmick. The enemies are visually impressive, as is the space background. Is it a warehouse? A space station? It doesn’t matter, it just looks good. There’s a story in the game that has us as the only person capable of getting us out of this mess. I love it.

Cut to 2025. I’m playing Capcom’s Pragmata at Summer Game Fest. It’s their latest upcoming space shooter. The controls are loose, in a good way. There is great locomotion. There’s a neat gimmick and a compelling narrative. I need to escape this space base, and I may be the only person able to save humanity.

And I’m falling in love with this genre again.

Pragmata, the latest from Capcom, has emerged out of its years-long slumber to show us that it’s still alive and kicking (more like shooting and hacking) to remind us that there was an awesome era of 3rd person action video games that we’ve been missing. My hands-on with it made me realize how much I’ve missed this style of play, this bodacious blockbuster that throws a lot at us and yet somehow still works. Our demo takes place at the very first part of the game, where our hero awakens on a station and needs to survive an onslaught of enemies. We’re joined by a strange young girl (we find out in the game’s trailer that she may be an android) who perches herself on our back as we try to escape.

But beware, because as soon as we start trying to shoot our way out of this situation we quickly realize that these enemy robots use advanced armor and our pitiful blasts just bounce off of them. No worries though, as our little friend can hack electronics, and this extends to the shielding systems of the bots. The game tasks us with juggling a few things at once: hacking and shooting, and moving around. When we aim at an enemy (using left trigger) a hacking panel pops up on the right side, signifying that our girl is embedded into the enemy’s mainframe. Using the face buttons as left, right, up and down, we move a little cursor around the hacking “tiles” to an icon that disables the defense. These tile boards can be small or big, are randomized each time, and have little obstacles in the way depending on the strength of the enemy. We have a set number of moves we can do, or else we have to reset and try again. When her part is done we can send shots at the enemy that actually pierce its armor, while still holding that left trigger button down the entire time.

It may seem complex, but in actual use it flows easily. Thankfully the robots move slightly slower than what you may normally come across in an action game, giving us some time to do a few of these tricks at one, but it’s a gimmick that works well. My old man brain normally can’t do two things like this at once, but this was easy even for me.

As we get further into the game we can acquire better hacking abilities, like being able to cause a stun or extending the number of moves. We can make it to the hacking goal as fast as we want, or we can try and do more with the board to better set us up for success. It just depends on how much time we have and what enemy we’re up against, and if we’re willing to try and move a little faster than we may be ready for.

The demo has us taking on these enemies, sometimes facing a few at a time, while we unlock five keys around the facility as we try to escape through a gate. It culminates with a giant boss making their way into the room, at which point the PR rep waves at me to finish my play session. “Sorry, that’s where this ends for now!”

But I didn’t want to. Pragmata feels real good, real natural, and it’s coming at the right time as we’re meddling in quadruple-A level games. Sometimes we just want to have fun in space, and in Pragmata we may be able to, even with a weird child on our shoulder.