Who knew that Gears of War would lead to this?

First we celebrate the fact that pragmata is a real game. The upcoming SCI -Fi Capcom was first announced during the PlayStation 5 in 2020. This release date moved to 2023, which eventually turned into indefinite popularity. I expected the pragma to be quietly canceled until I found out that I was playing it at this year's summer game games.

Diana of pragmaty on the shoulders of the astronaut.

Pragmata could be before that this line from the State of Play trailer

Techno trailer State of Play, which we did not know about when the game was first revealed in 2020.

So yes pragmata is real, although still It has no more specific release date than sometime in 2026, it seems to bring nicely. I still have a lot of questions, but it's nice to finally have a pretty good idea of what is pragmata, and in classic capcomm it's quite strange.

Hack and shoot, shoot and hack

The main trick of pragmata, which is not at all clear of the “First Contact” trailer at the Summer Game Fest, is that you have to control both of its main characters simultaneously. The astronaut Hugh and Diana, the little orphan of Android, joined to escape the lunar base siege with enemy AI and her army murderous. Hugh naturally processes shooting, while Diana uses his technology to penetrate into robots and deactivate their defense.

After a short cutscene, where Hugh woke up to find that Diana had a tendency to his wounds, you are thrown directly into the fight, where I immediately found that the bullets did not do much on the metal exterior or the weakest killer. Fortunately, Diana can solve a small maze and reveal his weak points, allowing Hugh to blast them because every heroic space man is not used to.

The trick is that hackering occurs in real time. When you hold the left trigger to make you feel, there is a small 5×5 grid overlap near the enemy. Using four buttons on the face for navigation, down, left and right, you will need to create a path from point A to point B while walking through a certain number of circuits to completely chain them. The successful completion of the puzzle within the time limit temporarily deactivates the defense toaters.

Because the game does not stop when you are going to argue, you also need to keep Hugh and Diana (who run on Hugh's back, Kazooie-style) from danger. If it sounds hard, avoiding, duck, immersion, diving and avoiding the coming fire with one half of the controller and at the same time navigation of abstract mazes with another, well, that is. It forces you to divide your attention in a similar way to the active mechanic of Gears of War – but moves to a completely different level of complexity.

Pragmata Hugh shoots a robot while Diana solves a hacker puzzle.

If Hugh's only work was to tap the dance around the coming fire, as if he were Bugs Bunny, he could hack every enemy you encounter, tedious. Fortunately, there are some tools that can use to remain busy and buy Diana for some time. For example, I soon found a weapon that fired on the ground Stasis Fields to slow down every enemy who entered them. Before I started hacking any robot, I would make sure it protects myself with several well -placed stages between me and enemies. While my other weapons slots were devoted to traditional weapons (guns and shotguns), I expect Hugh to find more of these creative tools to help control the battlefield, while Diana tends to her hacker duties.

When you finish a hack, it's quite epic. Time slows briefly when electricity surrounds the robot. Gyrate and tear, reveal the inner functioning of their bodies and give Hugh the soft target to fire. Shooting now causes the expected amount of damage and every part you hit will light up as well as machines in the horizon. There is a lot of satisfying spectacle that balances the way the pragmata takes something as trivial as Baddies, and adds a obstructive layer of puzzles to the top.

It is a kind of mechanics that will have to evolve often throughout the game to make it interesting, and I only saw a hint in my practical demo. In the cash register around the station you will find the type of consumer object that can be found in your hacker puzzles a new type of perimeter. If you decide to stretch the way through one of these tiles, the robot will cause more damage when hacking. The chip has a limited number of applications, so you have to make sure you prefer it while hacking strong enemies and avoiding it if not.

Cosmic age lone wolf and chick

Environmental puzzles Juxtapose combat meetings. You will have to hack more things to do a lunar device such as doors and lifts, and the way forward is rarely straightforward. But if you have to escape from the space station overtaken by evil AI, you can do worse than a jetpack and a subordinate child with super strength – just make sure you are emotionally ready for her to start calling your dad.

With the last season of the last of us, the ending, upcoming edition of Death Stranding 2 and all the buzzing around the Tech Demo for The Witcher 4, now it is difficult to avoid dad-on. I hate it – it's an effective way to immediately increase the betting and make the protagonist empathetic and relative, but I haven't seen enough pragms to judge how well it is. I hope that the trope will somehow, given what Diana is, and Capcom's hobby of being a little weird with him.

Capcom will never start new franchises. If you do not count exoprimally (and who would?) Pragmata is the first new IP capcom since 2013 at Crusher Gaist at 3DS. We hope that the pragma will end up with a stronger heritage. I have doubted that the pragma sometimes comes to hope that it will be really good. There are still so many unknowns about this game, but I am sold when it comes to combo hackering and shooting.