Pax Autocratica: say totalitarian regime, add mechs, and we are perfectly happy

Let us admit it plainly: when someone announces a totalitarian regime, no parliament, no opposition turning up to bother us with procedure, we are already pleased. When they add that there will also be mechs and heavy fighting, we are downright delighted. That is how it is, and it commits nobody but us, but video games hold a very particular guilty pleasure in running a society with a hand that does not shake.

Pax Autocratica launches today in Early Access on Steam, developed and published by Multiverse, at around thirty dollars with a launch discount. And it must be said straight away: it looks great.

RimWorld and Roboquest in the same executable

The best description of this game comes not from the studio but from a player on Reddit, asking whether he might one day get Roboquest and RimWorld in the same executable. That is exactly it, and it is every bit as strange as it sounds.

The colony half is a full management game. You build your state in the fractured territories of the Tyris System, assigning citizens to mine, gather, haul, research, and manufacture weapons, armour and food. Above all, you decide how to hold your population: through fear, propaganda, surveillance and punishment, or through comfort and prosperity if you are feeling merciful. Your people become grateful, afraid, loyal or quietly rebellious, until the day discontent turns into revolt.

The other half is an FPS roguelite in which you go to the front in person, alongside your troops. It starts as desperate skirmishes and ends as large-scale mechanised war, with infantry, tanks, mechs, drones, artillery and projectile patterns that overlap into bullet hell. You collect cores between runs that reshape how your guns handle, create synergies with one another, or strengthen the soldiers fighting beside you.

Or turn them into sacrificial shields, because the game very explicitly offers you the option of using your own troops as cannon fodder to survive. We will come back to that.

The best system in the game is also the most disturbing

Here is the idea that binds the two halves, and it is brilliant. Enemies weakened in combat can be captured and dragged back to your base. Behind the prison doors you choose: break the resistance through fear, indoctrination, execution, or conversion. An enemy then becomes a productive citizen, a warning aimed at would-be rebels, or one more tool of the state.

That is the kind of mechanic that turns a spoil of war into a management dilemma, and it is where the game stops being a simple joke about dictators. An Early Access review points out that the fear and morale system is what works best: brutal shortcuts, like electrocuting a captive, raise the gauge immediately, while bringing it back down demands slow, costly, compassionate actions. Cruelty is efficient in the short term. That is the whole subject.

Same on the population side: citizens form relationships and start families, which gives social weight to your policy decisions instead of reducing them to sliders. You are not moving units, you are breaking up households.

The graphics, and the necessary caveat

On this point I agree without reservation: it is genuinely handsome. The dystopian world is coherent, full of sly references and design flourishes, and the atmosphere swings well between oppressive and satirical without ever losing its crooked smile. That is what gives the game its immediate personality.

The rough edges should still be flagged, because they have been noticed. Character models do not always match their portraits, which breaks the illusion once you grow attached to a citizen. Elite units are content to be scaled-up models, which reads as lazy. And a player who tried the demo noticed that armour does not change your character's appearance, an irritating detail in a game where you collect equipment. Nothing fatal, but the finish is not at the level of the art direction.

What the community is already asking for

The studio's AMA on r/Games, run by Alexis, one of the developers who mainly introduces himself as Minister of Propaganda, is very instructive about expectations.

The most recurring question is the balance between the two halves. One player explains clearly that he came for the colony management, that the trailer shows almost nothing but shooting, and that he would like to know which way the game actually leans. It is the right question, and it will decide a lot of purchases. Another wants to know how deep the simulation will go, asking half seriously whether food will one day need storing in freezers to preserve its quality.

The rest concerns customisation, with insistent demands for capes and colour schemes for one's glorious state, and the question of whether the game will offer a built narrative or remain a sandbox. On that point the available review is already clear: the story functions mostly as flavour text handing out objectives, and it will need fleshing out before the full release.

The question that needed asking

One player asked the only genuinely serious question in the thread: does the studio have any plan for handling the actual fascists who will inevitably latch onto the project?

That is the risk of every successful satire. Tropico, Papers Please and a few others learned it first: the moment a game puts you in the authoritarian's chair and makes the exercise enjoyable, part of the audience stops hearing the irony. And Pax Autocratica does not pretend, it lets you electrocute prisoners to save time and sacrifice your own soldiers to save your skin.

The studio has a clear answer. Its founder states that they are building this game so players interrogate power rather than glorify it, turning civics into systems you can test, with their trade-offs and unintended consequences. That is the right intention, and the game describes itself as a work about power, how it is built and how it corrupts.

Even so, the gap between intention and reception is never fully controllable. It will be on them to hold the line, and on us to keep laughing through gritted teeth.

In the meantime, yes: a totalitarian state, mechs, bullet hell and prisoners to convert, in a game with the decency to look good and to know what it is talking about. A free demo and a free prologue are available to form an opinion before paying, and since this is Early Access, that is exactly what you should do.

Players have now settled it, and decisively: Steam reviews are Very Positive at 89 percent across more than 700 reviews. For an Early Access game mixing colony sim and FPS, that reception validates the studio's bet.