Why players are talking about Pax Autocratica

After years of development and a complete identity crisis, Earth From Another Sun reinvented itself as Pax Autocratica—and players suddenly love it.

The project has been around in one form or another for years, changing direction several times before finally settling on something much more focused. Now available in Early Access, Pax Autocratica mixes colony management, base building and first-person roguelite combat into one very unusual package. Instead of simply watching your army fight from above, you can actually grab a weapon, leave your settlement and join the battle yourself.

Back at base, the game is all about building your own authoritarian sci-fi society. You gather resources, construct new facilities, research technology and assign citizens to different jobs. Keeping everyone under control is just as important as keeping them productive, though. Citizens can become unhappy or rebellious, while propaganda, surveillance, fear and rewards can all be used to maintain order.

Then things get much louder. Combat takes place in first person, with your soldiers fighting alongside you against enemy troops, vehicles, tanks, mechs and bosses. Roguelite upgrades called Cores allow you to modify your weapons and army during runs, creating increasingly ridiculous builds as battles become more chaotic. You can even capture defeated enemies and bring them back to your colony, where they can potentially be imprisoned, recruited or indoctrinated into your growing regime.

Players are already making some interesting comparisons

The Early Access reception has been surprisingly positive so far, with players particularly enjoying how many different genres Pax Autocratica manages to combine. Comparisons to RimWorld and Cult of the Lamb are easy to understand thanks to the colony-management side, while some players have also compared parts of its base system to Palworld.

Once the shooting starts, however, the game feels much closer to a fast roguelite FPS, with increasingly busy battlefields, upgrades and plenty of projectiles flying across the screen.

It is still Early Access, so players have also pointed out rough edges, including some jank, optimization issues and systems that could use more depth. Even so, the overall reaction suggests that Multiverse may finally have found the right identity for a project that spent years searching for one.

If the idea of running a questionable space dictatorship before personally leading its army into a massive firefight sounds like your kind of chaos, make sure to use our price comparison tool to find the best prices for Pax Autocratica before jumping in.