Pax Autocratica: Prologue

I saw this on Splattercat's channel and watched his vid before coming to check this out myself. It seemed interesting and certainly had a different flavor to other colony games I have played which promised a fresh experience. However, I wasn't very impressed overall. I'm giving it a thumbs down for visibility but it would be neutral if Steam allowed such.

(Also, I wanted to say real quick at the start that counter to Gammonzilla's negative review decrying the sexless armor female humans wear, as a woman myself I am grateful for any depiction of women that is not inherently sexualized. It makes sense that women in power armor or bulky environment suits would not look drastically different to men, thank you for not putting them in boob plate or something.)


The game is very pretty in the 1st person sections, even on my archaic system, but overall the game is kind of just middling in my opinion. It incorporates systems from a wide variety of genres, but no one aspect of it was particularly engaging which may be due to being too broad in scope? I'm not saying the devs should cut out any of what is present, just that what is present feels like it needs more work to start feeling good.

• Resource gathering is terrible as the player but you have to engage in it early on. Holding the F key for several minutes to get the resources that you need to do the next task in getting started is so damn annoying. There were plenty of times during the first 30-45 minutes that I was on the verge of just quitting the game. Not because I was having to gather, but because gathering is slow and you have to hold a specific key to do it. On the other hand, later on once you have all the resources covered by bots resources are essentially negligible, so it feels like there is no middle ground. I also dislike that the player gathers so much slower than bots. I get that this is may be to help steer the player into the mindset that laborers should be doing the labor, but there doesn't seem to be a way to speed up the day (and thus progress on work) which leaves the player either going AFK or participating in an annoying system.
• Base building is basic, but I like the build-mode for a 1st person game, and also that buildings can be moved for free, great choice. I would say that it is cool that the player can participate in the act of construction, but as with resource gathering, the player's contribution is significantly lower than that of bots so it feels pointless outside of very specific instances.
• Combat felt... clunky? I'm not sure. I enjoy shooters in either 3rd or 1st person perspective, but I was really struggling to hit anything in this game's combat. I ended up just using the shotgun at point-blank range almost exclusively. It might help if there was a cover/peeking mechanic, especially if the bots would use it. Also, the reticule needs contrast from the background. I was having trouble seeing it in too many instances. Give it a black border or something at the bare minimum.
• You can take bots with you when you go fight but they are dumb as rocks and fall easily (at least early on, where the starter bot seems to die with only a couple kills and little damage dealt compared to damage taken seeming to indicate it is only getting kills because it is finishing off something I was attacking), and only the starter bot won't die permanently so I avoid taking bots into combat which makes combat a slog. The only fun combat missions I came across were ones where several allied soldiers spawned in and you were all attacking en masse thus spreading out the incoming damage and just being more visually interesting.
• Stellar exploration is serviceable, but feels like it could be cut entirely and little would be lost. Like, encounter generation could be a function of interacting with the shuttle or a scanner placed in the base and it would result in essentially the same gameplay. To be clear I don't want it cut, but I feel like it needs something to jazz it up. I like that POI detection is done in a limited radius, and I imagine that different ships later on will alter that radius, but it would be nice if there was some indication of where you had explored already as either fog of war or maybe a visible trail of where the ship has flown. I think something that I dislike is that click+drag is not a viable control and instead you navigate only by clicking. This makes me feel detached from what is going on. I would much rather fly the ship in a 3d space, but I recognize that is likely well beyond the scope of the game and also pointless without some sort of in-space dogfight encounters, so adding in click+drag would allow for a sense of direct control without needing to build a 3d space flight section.

The whole theme of the game is that you're a loyal, brain-washed commander serving an authoritarian regime looking for an opportunity to invade a neighboring power. You're supposed to be this uncaring overlord managing an army of disposable fodder, but because you struggle early on to even have workers you end up treating them like a precious commodity and don't use them in all roles for fear of losing them and setting yourself back horrendously. Maybe this is an issue with me approaching the game incorrectly, but it seems to defeat the purpose. I dunno, maybe getting new laborers is super easy, barely an inconvenience even, but that hasn't been apparent to me so far and only nearly three hours in do I now have laborers I don't specifically need.

Also, the tutorial... So often is it the case that the player is cast as some esteemed leader of men, a tactical prodigy, a brilliant strategist playing 4-d chess; but the tutorial is written to where some underling is talking to you like you're a know-nothing idiot. This game is no different. I long for a game written to where the tutorial is the experienced player character directing fresh-faced recruits in the intricacies of whatever the game is about, and over the course of the experience they are forged into a capable force.

Maybe these last two complaints of mine are supposed to be part of the satire? If so, it felt like they missed the mark for me.

In closing, I have wishlisted the main game to keep tabs on it and would be likely to purchase it so long as it isn't priced like a triple-A title, so my negative review shouldn't be seen as condemnation or whatever. I think this could be a good game and I am interested to see how it turns out.

During Next Fest, I had my reservations before with how the Roguelike elements seem tacked onto a basebuilder, like how Cult of the Lamb has weak combat compared to the more interesting parts of managing your cultists and your facilities.

Interactions felt like a chore as you had to track and hunt down soldiers, you had to assign all work to them to get anything done as you could only whip or order things, and I thought that the thing was lacking a lot of juice in the combat department with sounds and feedback.

It's all better now! Not perfect, certainly, but the devs are certainly listening to feedback, and I'm happy they do, because I've always wanted to be at the heart of a tyrannical space empire, enforcing liberty and peace through the barrel of a gun while managing my loyal citizens as best I can.

The game's pretty limited for a prologue, obviously, with none of the long-term systems for sustaining a base such as the farming and ranching elements or more advanced research. But, it will teach you if you like this game if you enjoy the same loop as the Lamb:

1. Manage your people, build stuff, assign research, and build/manage your weapons loadout.
2. Go out into the roguelite star system, changing planets and encounters every time.
3. Face the same few enemy types, with some very nice variations with the Elites and their bags of tricks.
4. Go home, hopefully with money, resources, recruits, and "forcibly recruited people."
5. Unpack, and go back to step 1.

Lots of potential here. I'm not part of the EFAS history and don't really care that the devs had to drastically scale back their MMO living world ambitions. What remained of the collapse of that project seems to be rebuilding quite nicely into a more realistic scale of a single player world without all the hell that online and persistence will get you. It plays into the fantasy of being a tyrannical badass space warlord, yet it also has devs listening to make it a less friction-filled experience, aside from intended blocks of progression and research to get more powerful.

I'll be watching the game whenever it comes, about next year or 2027, by my guesses. It's coming from a negative perception considering it's history, but if you weren't financially burned by that, I can see that the remaining devs and the work are trying to turn things around for the better.

They couldn't make an epic sci-fi MMO, but they're certainly on the way to making their lighthearted Imperium of Man simulator.

It's got huge battlefields to fight on,
it's got roguelike builds that change every run,
it's got base-building and enemy capturing,
it's got NPC management, farming, crafting,
it's got tanks, mechs, elites, and bosses with crazy abilities…
Honestly, it's got everything a player could ask for.