Pragmata Review: A streamlined and satisfying follow-up to Resident Evil Requiem

With artificial intelligence changing how people work and live, it’s no surprise that a new sci-fi game from Capcom practical Harnesses the zeitgeist to create a new look at the third-person shooter. The game successfully remixes Resident Evil-style action with smooth gameplay and a fairly challenging campaign. For anyone who’s too intimidated to try a Resident Evil game, this is a great alternative. For those who just want more of the latest Resident Evil RequiemThis is a great stalker.

Many modern sci-fi games have focused on expansive, endless gameplay, such as Starfield and No Man’s Sky. Pragma is a smaller experience with a lot of action and reasonably fun mechanics. It’s a breath of fresh air for anyone who wants to spend a great weekend shooting robots, hanging out with your AI daughter and coming up with a space puzzle.

Pragmata has the look and feel of a Resident Evil game – it’s built on the Resident Evil Requiem engine – but draws from its own experience with a unique mid-combat mechanic. While the main character, Hugh, shoots robotic enemies, his daughter’s AI character, Diana, can hack an enemy to render them vulnerable or even incapacitated. It adds another ball to juggling the tense gunfights that sometimes overwhelmed me, but it’s an overall satisfying complexity to tried-and-true third-person shooter combat.

In gameplay mechanics and the relationship between characters, Diana is the core of Pragmata’s appeal. Your joy as a player will depend on how much you want the 3ft armed cute blonde girl to accompany you and help you fight. I personally found her adorable, especially in the quiet moments between missions when I could give her a basketball court or the swing I discovered in the field to liven up our sanitized space station shelter. In return, you’ll give me a crayon drawing that should end up in the space refrigerator. But I can also see her Kyuubi voice becoming annoying. You are either playing pragmatism with it or in spite of it.

I’m only halfway through the game, so I don’t have final thoughts on how satisfying the relationship will be, but playing with it moment to moment is… good. In battles, they are indispensable, requiring you to unlock enemies through a hacking mini-game that consists of navigating a small maze while enemies attack you. While playing on PS5, I pressed the face buttons on the right side of the controller to hack, while I used the left joystick to move and the shoulder buttons to shoot and dash. It’s a bit inelegant, but it increases the threat of slow-moving robot enemies (some of whom look like reconstituted zombies).

For the first few hours, I cast Pragmata as a Resident Evil space tamer with a distinct man-daughter fighting skill (we could have gotten this in Requiem if Leon had let Grace ride on his back and start blasting). But Capcom’s new game does away with more than just the horror by adapting the third-person shooter formula to a sci-fi setting, dropping complex lore and mechanics for a simple experience. Pragmata is a stronger experience with all its limitations – a short, punchy action game with enough heart to keep the player engaged.

With pragmatism, less is more

Pragmatism wastes little time urging players into action. The game begins with a short cutscene introducing the main character, Hugh, along with three colleagues who come to a suspiciously quiet moon base owned by Delphi, a giant conglomerate meets Apple and SpaceX. A few minutes later, a moonquake splits the team and drops Hugh into the arms of a robot who, for reasons unclear to me, is designed to look and talk like a 5-year-old white girl. Hugh quickly calls her Diana.

Capcom clearly wanted players to bond with and care for a young boy, the latest in a series of unexpected fathers learning to care for their pseudo-daughters (The Last of Us, The Witcher 3, BioShock Infinite, Telltale’s The Walking Dead). Subverting, aside from Diana’s potential greater purpose as a pragmata robot, is that she is a powerful robot who is in no apparent danger, even in gunfights. Instead of requiring the player to constantly care for her – similar to other daughter characters who need companionship, such as Ashley in Resident Evil 4 – the game reduces the protagonist’s role to merely guiding Diana into character, rather than maintaining her fragile existence.

This is one of the many ways that Pragmata makes the game simpler than it could have been, and arguably a better experience for it. Players have a basic weapon that reloads itself along with a special weapon with limited ammo. They also have slots for two other types of special-use firearms or equipment that affect the battlefield, from stasis nets to booby traps that distract enemies. There are no large armories – just options for the options you want to bring into combat.

There’s more in-depth customization for players who want to delve deeper into the game’s unlockables, which include a series of mods and equipable bonuses for Diana’s hacking abilities, many of which are tucked away in the corners of the moonbase’s various sections. There are optional simulation challenge levels that players can tackle to boost Hue or unlock traditional files and costumes.

Pragmata: It’s not difficult, it’s not easy, it’s just satisfying

Pragmata’s simplified systems allow players the freedom to focus on linear progression through the game, which is broken down into room after room of simple, satisfying challenges. Most are different groups of enemies of increasing complexity, each requiring hacking to render Hugh’s firearms vulnerable. Others involve opening doors by scanning somewhat hidden locking nodes, requiring a light platform and pointing the nose up and down and around the corners of the atrial arenas. I’m neither frustrated nor bored, I’m just comfortably enjoying the game.

The culmination of each of the above sections are the boss battles – satisfyingly unique giant robots that fire missiles and lasers as they stomp and charge around the maps, prompting players to juggle hacking while dashing out of the way. These are fun endurance tests that are surprisingly well tuned. One time, after some sloppy play, the third district boss underestimated me greatly, and I spent the next five minutes on defense, barely getting the win. Most importantly, I only had to experience each boss fight once; In a way, Capcom has avoided the trend of making bosses challenging enough, but not to the level of Soulsborne’s intensity that requires each one of them multiple attempts to overcome.

Sickos’ difficult gameplay may be turned off (harder difficulties are available after beating the game), but I enjoyed the subtle level of challenge presented by the bosses and enemies throughout Pragmata: I come, I fight, and I move forward. This is a smooth experience, with a satisfying speed bump of enemies amidst the story and the development of the relationship between Hugh and Diana. I’m running, jumping, hacking, and shooting, a necessary momentum to keep me from asking crippling questions like “Why didn’t they make androids adults?” and “Why would the super-intelligent robot draw pictures of Hugh at all, let alone pictures that look like they were made by 5-year-olds with a crayon?”

Ultimately, I couldn’t care less, because having a crayon-drawn portrait of a character who is functionally the adopted daughter of the protagonist has a humanizing effect. And for such a collection of bizarre moments, Pragmata has a lot of fluid action between Hugh and Diana, who work as a fun team.

And every once in a while, the game pauses for a minute or two to let the guy from Earth tell the moon-born robot what life is like on a blue planet. It may not make sense for a robot to care, but the game is so simplistic that its crimes are minimal, and I’ll let it carry me along its serious, nonsensical train for a little while longer. There would probably be a battle ahead of the Rad leader anyway.