Pax Autocratica is a unique game in several ways, but one of the most obvious is a matter of perspective. See, when it comes to colony sims, the genre’s foundational rule is that players watch from above, hovering over their settlements like a benevolent weather system that occasionally decides who starves. Yet Steam’s latest breakout in that space, the aforementioned Pax Autocratica, commits what should be a cardinal sin against the rule by putting players on the ground, in first person, for nearly all of its offered game time.
Funnily enough, Pax Autocratica actually seems to be better for it, as since the game arrived in Early Access on August 10, it’s steadily sat at a Very Positive rating, with 92% of more than 1,400 reviews landing on the good side. Losing the overhead view should gut the management half of that equation, but what makes the difference here is twofold. For one, it’s a darkly satirical colony sim about running a totalitarian state, but it’s also welded to an FPS roguelite where players personally lead their troops into battle.
Why Pax Autocratica Axes the Top-Down Perspective
-
-
-
Before digging into Pax Autocratica, it’s worth noting that there are plenty of reasons the distance a top-down camera view provides remains a huge part of the grammar of the colony-sim genre; in many ways, that view doubles as an alibi. RimWorld, Frostpunk, Banished, and Tropico all use such an angle because the gap between the player and a spreadsheet’s worth of humans is where much of the fun lives, and where most of the ethical questions that might spring up vanish. From that overhead angle, it’s a lot easier to optimize a person into something like a mining rotation because a person, from that height, is more like a number with a name.
Rearrange the covers into the correct US release order.
Rearrange the covers into the correct US release order.
Easy (5)Medium (7)Hard (10)
But given the satirical nature of a game like Pax Autocratica and a Steam tagline like “wield absolute power and make every life bend to your will,” it’s clear the player is meant to feel their handiwork firsthand. So, while it keeps that management layer completely intact — with job assignment, research, propaganda, surveillance, and a choice between ruling through fear and through comfort and prosperity — the camera convention splits. The game’s colony construction happens via a jetpack that lifts your character into the air for a first-person view from above; it provides all of the traditional view’s ease of access while maintaining a certain presence in the world players are tasked with dominating.
A Genre Pile-Up That Has No Business Working This Well
-
-
-
That’s only part of the first-person hook, though, as beyond any thematics, Pax Autocratica just has a lot going on in the gameplay department. Steam user SubjectPsycho wrote one of the more useful reviews of the launch window, cataloging the game’s borrowed parts one at a time: Mount & Blade‘s overmap-into-battle structure, a Palworld-style capture system for prisoners, RTS base building a la RimWorld, and a Helldivers-adjacent satirical register (of course). That makes it seem derivative, but it’s clear that all of these references were meant to be complimentary; after all, he posted it at 39.3 hours played, four days after launch, and his profile now reads 155.5 hours, admitting:
“I have been unable to put this addictive game away, and I regret nothing.”
That pace makes plenty of sense, because aside from very solid gameplay and feel in the hand, Pax Autocratica makes its central strategy game design conceit work. Your soldiers are your workforce and your army at once—the people mining ore and hauling supplies around the colony are the same ones you march into a firefight, which ties every combat decision directly to the colony’s output. Soldiers lost on a bad expedition might cost you an upcoming battle and the next several days of production.
Pax’s Prisoners Are a Resource
The capture system extends that logic as a particularly neat part of the package. Weakened enemies can be dragged back to base and imprisoned, where resistance is broken through fear, indoctrination, execution, or conversion into citizens who work the same jobs as everyone else. The roguelite systems follow suit, offering upgrades that strengthen the troops fighting beside you or turn them into shields that absorb damage meant for you.
Pax Autocratica’s Early Access Caveats
-
-
-
Of course, the important caveat to a sprawling indie title like this is that it is still very much an Early Access title. Most Steam reviews and hands-on coverage are consistent about where the seams show, flagging stuff like long load times between the base and expeditions, alongside an auto-assignment system that ignores soldier stats and leaves research specialists swinging pickaxes. On the battlefields, hectic combat means enemies often clip through the player or trip underneath the map, and for some players (mostly those on Steam that’ve played beyond the 30-hour mark), the base building can become shallower than originally expected.
Yet as I see it, most of these issues are natural given what this game is and where it’s at in early access. Additionally, most of the critical reviews I’ve seen do (at the very least) maintain that Pax Autocratica holds a ton of promise down the line, if not now. Steam user Terrator’s widely read negative review concluded that “the amount of systems already present makes the potential pretty obvious,” and several others note how visibly the studio is listening; developer Multiverse has been publishing prioritized fix lists since launch, and its eight-day update reported 100,000 players against more than 500,000 remaining wishlists.
Additionally, Pax Autocratica‘s Steam store page noted that certain “icons and portraits were initially made with help from AI tools, then carefully refined by our artists” and that developer Multiverse was “actively reworking or replacing all remaining AI-generated assets before launch to ensure everything reflects the team’s artistic vision.”
Pax Autocratica Dodged a Major Bullet
And all things considered, I think this Pax Autocratica is in a significantly better place than it might’ve been a few years ago. The project spent years as an MMO called Earth From Another Sun before a renaming in August 2025, and in that earlier form it carried a Solana NFT layer, a planned token, and a play-and-earn model announced to backers during the 2022 crypto boom. Thankfully, all of it is gone, and the game currently on Steam is a single-player title with no crypto attached.
Pax Autocratica Rules With An Iron Fist
-
-
-
Ultimately, what Pax Autocratica achieves at its scale is impressive, especially as it eschews the genre’s traditional overhead view in favor of its own confident thing. That top-down view was always a kind of mercy, both in terms of ease of access and morality, but Pax Autocratica takes that away with admirable intentionality. It’s still easy to use, but the consequences remain; it’s a bold thing for a colony sim to do, and I love that Multiverse found a way to make that happen fittingly.
Especially given there’s a version of this story in which the project never escapes its own history as a title built to capitalize on the well-and-truly terrible NFT gaming niche that never took off. Two years of Early Access is a long runway, but a studio this responsive, with this many people already playing, has the conditions to make good use of it. Whether Pax Autocratica ends up among the best colony sims on Steam is a question for a later build, but as it stands, it’s made a pretty impressive impression so far.
- Released
-
August 10, 2026
- Developer(s)
-
Multiverse
- Publisher(s)
-
Multiverse
- Number of Players
-
Single-player
- Steam Deck Compatibility
-
Unknown
