I’ve spent the last week checking out Pax Autocratica, and despite being in Early Access I’m happy to say that it’s shaping up to scratch an itch I didn’t quite know I had. The game splits itself neatly in two: a base-building mind puzzle and an FPS-roguelite shoot-em-up, and it’s the way those two halves compliment one another that makes it stand out.
Running the show back home
Between missions, you’re managing a base from the ground up. You choose what to build, then research your way into new buildings, weapons, armour, spaceships, and abilities as you go. None of it runs itself, either — you assign soldiers to work each station, managing their hunger, pacing how much they work and ensuring their morale stays high. It’s less a backdrop for the action and more a system you’re actively tending, one upgrade path at a time.
Resources, new recruits, and prisoners you bring home all feed back into this loop. You’re never just returning from a mission, you’re returning with the means to build further, which is what makes the base feel like it’s actually growing rather than just sitting there waiting for your next visit.
Boots on the ground
On the roguelite side, you fly your ship out to different planets and choose whether to touch down and fight for what’s there. Once you’re in, it plays like an FPS roguelite: you choose core fragments, which stack up as you go and then reset once the expedition ends. What doesn’t reset are the unlocks you’re chipping away at across the whole game, so every run does feel like it’s building toward something even after your fragments wipe.
It’s a tight loop: fly out, fight, come home with something to show for it, then decide what to do with it back at base.
While initially impressed with the combat, I did find it to feel a bit lacking in depth after sinking in a few hours. The gun play and movement is smooth and feels fast without being too hectic. The time to kill is satisfying, with bigger enemies feeling like a bit of a challenge without being a drag. The guns feel unique, have their own quirks and are upgradable back in base as you progress. As a raw FPS, Pax really hits the mark.
However, the core fragments just didn’t pack the punch that felt appropriate — especially towards the end of an expedition where you’ve maxed them out. I feel like some optimisation could be made with reduction of gun damage in favour of fragment playing a bigger role, to make it feel like your decisions when choosing them really make a different.
READ MORE: Roguelite Recommendations for Dummies
Should you try it out?
If you’re into roguelite first person shooters, it’s worth a shot — especially considering the roadmap they’ve announced through the early access. For me, the base half of Pax Autocratica helped to scratch the same itch that Satisfactory did: resource management, building out your infrastructure, and staffing it all with workers you need to actually manage rather than set and forget.
On the combat side, it actually gave me big flashbacks to another Coffee Stain Studios game: Sanctum 2, a hybrid tower defence/FPS game. There’s a similar energy here on the expedition side — even without any of the tower-defense mechanics that game was built around. I can’t fully explain why it clicks the same way, but the gun play especially gave me the same feeling Sanctum 2 did, and given my love for that game, it was a good click.
Having just released into early access, the team at Multiverse has a big job ahead of them with plenty of announced features still to be released. But as it stands today, Pax Autocratica runs well, looks crisp and has a tight gameplay loop that has kept me wanting to come back for more. It’s certainly worth keeping an eye on as they continue to release new features.
Early access to Pax Autocratica was supplied to Quest Daily by the publisher.
