Pax Autocratica Early Access Review – Well-Oiled Oppression

Pax Autocratica is a darkly satirical colony sim and FPS roguelite hybrid—currently in Early Access—where you’re tasked with establishing a foothold in the frontier system of Tyris to push out rival authoritarian factions on behalf of the totalitarian Aurorian government. The base building, soldier management, and roguelite expeditions all feed into one another surprisingly well, and effective management lets you scale your strength even higher with each successive outing. The gameplay is similar to Cult of the Lamb and Palworld had a love child and named Doomguy as the godfather, which is probably some of the highest praise I can offer.

Base building serves as the operational hub for everything you do, with your colony starting as little more than a dusty patch of land with a command center and a lone soldier. From there, it’s up to you to set up essential infrastructure. You’ll need to research barracks to house your troops, mess halls to keep them fed, and production centers to turn raw materials into gear, just for starters. Eventually you’ll unlock more specialized buildings like greenhouses, refineries, and bathhouses, watching your dusty little outpost grow into a majestic, brutalist paradise. Managing the sheer number of facilities you eventually unlock would be a nightmare for one person, but the Great Leader need not dirty his hands with mere busywork. Soldiers can be assigned to run most facilities, either hand-picked by you or auto-assigned based on who boasts the best stats for the job.

The methods you employ when managing the colony are entirely up to you, whether you want to be a benevolent leader or a tyrannical overlord. For instance, you can force soldiers to maintain brutal 21-hour workdays, with barely any time left over for sleep, or you can cut back on their shifts to give them free time for friends and family (relationships that form naturally based on their daily interactions). Both approaches have their tradeoffs, however. Soldiers earn the same pay for a full day’s labor as they do for a measly eight hours, while overworking them leads to exhaustion and low morale, which in turn leads to reduced efficiency and labor strikes. You could lower daily pay to reflect the reduced hours, of course, but doing so lowers morale and loyalty over time, with decreased loyalty leading to protests that spread dissent and eventually drive soldiers to defect.

Fortunately, if you’re more efficiency-minded than kind-hearted, there are plenty of alternative options for handling low morale and disloyalty beyond decent pay and reasonable working hours. The gentlest approach is to win over dissenting soldiers with gifts or reassurance, but there’s no need to lean on diplomacy if you prefer a firmer hand. Simply implanting a bomb in everyone’s head does wonders for compliance, since soldiers with high fear are less likely to act out, although pushing fear too high can also lead to defection. That said, soldiers who are about to defect can be imprisoned for some much-needed reeducation of the electroshock variety, so long as you catch them in time. And even if cranial bombs aren’t your style, a few machine guns strategically placed around the colony’s perimeter are sure to drive the message home (and never you mind why they’re aimed inward). High fear keeps even the most disgruntled soldiers in line, proving that a terrified workforce is, if nothing else, an obedient one. Just keep in mind that how you treat one soldier affects everyone that cares about them, too.

Beyond the (relatively) peaceful day-to-day life in your colony, you can go on expeditions to gather resources, acquire gear, and generally expand your influence over the various sectors of the Tyris system. After selecting which soldiers to bring along, you’ll head into space, where you can direct your ship to nearby points of interest. These range from merchants and resource deposits to enemy outposts, just to name a few. Merchants offer useful commodities like recipes, gear blueprints, and fresh recruits, though you can also loot gear and capture enemy troops directly from the battlefield.

When boots hit the ground, firefights play out as frantic, momentum-driven arena battles that force you to stay on the move—sprinting, sliding, and double-jumping across battlefields as an onslaught of bullet hell rains down on you. You aren’t fighting solo, either, since your deployed soldiers join you as active combat support with their own distinct abilities based on their race and soldier class. You can issue basic commands like who to target and whether to group near you or engage enemies freely, but the real coordination comes from building a squad with complementary abilities to begin with. What I love most is that you can capture any humanoid enemy you encounter, and their abilities after you convert them are essentially the same as when you faced them in battle yourself.

Besides building up your labor force, raiding enemy outposts is the primary engine for scaling your strength on a run. Core fragment storage pods will drop down at various stages when raiding outposts, which is where the roguelite elements come into play. Cracking these open lets you pick one of three cores that modify the way your weapons perform, boost your survivability, or enhance your soldiers for that run. While it’s tempting to just explore every point of interest you see, enemy strength rises the more time you spend on an expedition, with their overall health and damage increasing with each level.

The real depth lies in stacking complementary core fragments to stay ahead of that scaling threat and create ridiculous, run-breaking synergies in true roguelite fashion. For instance, pairing the Hit Boost core that increases damage per hit with the Power Reload core that grants stacking damage boosts on reload turns rapid-fire and multi-shot weapons into DPS monsters. This damage gets further compounded when you couple it with a weapon core fragment like Thunderbolt Arrow for the bow that causes arrows to shock nearby foes for 100% weapon damage (especially since nocking an arrow counts for Power Reload). The resulting chain-lightning outbursts don’t just zap nearby enemies—they melt entire squadrons in seconds. That’s not even including cores like the Phantom Core that boost your movement and attack speed and subsequent upgrades like Phantom Assault that scale your damage output and reload speed directly off that movement speed. Throw in a second weapon core like Full Draw Shot, which increases maximum charge damage on the bow by 200%, and you’re swimming in pure absurdity. There’s nothing quite like zipping around the battlefield and unleashing a single arrow to call forth a thunderstorm that would make Thor blush.

That said, you won’t have access to every core fragment on your first run, nor the capacity to hold them all. New cores unlock over time, and your core capacity is limited starting out. As you level up and upgrade your base, you’ll unlock perks to increase that capacity, alongside passive abilities such as hovering and active abilities like deploying turrets and calling down nuclear strikes. It pays to return to base frequently to queue up new research, construct new facilities, and convert captured soldiers to further fuel your economic engine, which in turn funds better gear and further combat upgrades. Certain buildings even unlock entirely new mechanics, like the Vehicle Works letting you construct vehicles like the tank and mech. Honestly, returning to my colony to see what new gear I had unlocked, what new upgrade tiers I could afford, and just generally sprucing up my base was my favorite part of the game.

Pax Autocratica tries to be a lot all at once, and succeeds quite well at doing so. What makes the gameplay so satisfying is how tightly its systems intertwine, from the high-octane FPS roguelite elements to the slower-paced colony and soldier management. Unlike many roguelites, you always feel like you’re coming home with something new in Pax Autocratica, and the autonomy it grants you really makes you think whether all the tools it leaves at your disposal are worth using or if there’s actually a better way. The dark satire isn’t just window dressing—it is built directly into the core mechanics, constantly forcing you to weigh your own empathy against cold operational efficiency.

I have very few complaints about Pax Autocratica as a whole, and no truly meaningful ones. It was somewhat annoying how soldiers assigned to transporting resources would simply drop whatever they were holding wherever they were when their shift ended rather than at least dropping it off in the warehouse, but it was a relatively minor issue overall since dropped items never disappear anyway. I also would have loved to have a greater variety of buildings and decorations to populate my base with, but the developer, Multiverse, already plans on adding more of those in Pax Autocratica’s future.

Even in Early Access, Pax Autocratica stands out as a remarkably cohesive hybrid that delivers on nearly every front. The sheer thrill of its lightning-fast combat, absurd build synergies, and dark dystopian sandbox makes it one of the most promising Early Access titles of the year. Its mechanically deep, darkly hilarious yet thoughtful, and endlessly rewarding. The Tyris system is well worth conquering for any fans of roguelites or colony management.

Austin reviewed Pax Autocratica on PC in Early Access with a provided review code. This review is based on the version of the game available at the time of writing, and our score will not be changed.