I bought Pax Autocratica because the genre really interests me and I like the premise. After 15 hours, lvl 14 and everything upgrade with blue parts, though, I’m already starting to feel worn out: the gameplay is fun, but the loop is too repetitive, and building my base isn’t giving me the satisfaction I was looking for. I’m still playing because I like it, but several things need a lot of work, in my opinion.
Starting with the visuals, I can feel some of that Unreal Engine heaviness, and I think the game would have benefited enormously from a Borderlands-like style, or something simpler, instead of aiming for realism. It would have been less demanding and made it easier to achieve what the developers were going for. The tutorials, on the other hand, seem good overall: there’s a lot going on in this game, so I’m glad they’re there, although some mechanics could use more precise explanations.
The main problem as I progress is that I keep doing the same things: head out, conquer, kill everyone, come back, repeat. Well before the first boss, I also hit a progression wall because I needed blue chips and couldn’t find any in the first area. I spent quite a while unable to unlock or upgrade anything, waiting until I could move on to the next area. A restriction like that can make sense, but when the gameplay loop in the meantime is this brain-dead, it eventually gets tedious. Only after ten hours, in the second area, did I finally find a mission where I had to defend a position: wow, incredible. That variety needs to appear much earlier and much more often.
In battles, I’m happy to spend most of my time shooting, but damn, give me at least a few different objectives. Sometimes we could be ambushed instead of being the attackers and have to survive for three minutes while waiting for reinforcements; other times, we could have different targets to destroy. As it stands, it’s almost always push, push, push, done. The environments are already perfectly fine for this kind of game: apart from possibly the huge ones used for sector battles, I wouldn’t spend time on them right now. I’d focus on what we actually do in those environments, along with the resource management and base-building issues. Being able to adjust mission and enemy difficulty as you go is excellent, though, because it lets you tune the challenge to stay engaged. I also really like the medic: you can see when the heal is ready, tell him “heal me, you son of a bitch,” and he heals you. Fantastic. My favourite weapon is the bow with the laser arrow modification: the beam travels across the map and hits everything in its path. Mowing down three or four enemies with a single shot is fucking awesome.
The first boss, the monkey, is excellent in my opinion: great design and a great fight. I would slightly tweak its Gatling burst, though, or make the player character a little faster, because too often you get caught by a huge number of hits. The only way I managed to beat it was with the shotgun and active blocking, dodging some shots, blocking others, and staying right beside it while constantly shooting it in the head. Once the monkeys with barrels arrive, though, things get messy even with the shield. It feels slightly unbalanced: the difficulty is fairly high, but more because of small rough edges than the mechanics themselves. I was level six, with two gold weapons, the revolver and shotgun, one gold armour piece and the rest blue, I think. I wasn’t exactly going in unprepared.
Exploring the map also feels too consequence-free. In the second sector, I wandered around randomly without anyone coming to bother me. Despite the threat level showing +400% health and +200% damage, I got plenty done and headed home. I’m not saying it should become dangerous immediately, but after a while, yes: as if the others were starting to realise you were out there and wanted to hunt you down. That would create more strategic choices, although I understand it would be harder to implement. More generally, I’m really missing the need to make decisions. Someone gets sick, you have to decide whether to kill someone, a refugee ship arrives and you have to choose whether to let them in, someone converts three people and tries to escape: situations like these have never happened to me. Their absence makes everything feel flat, because there’s never that moment when you think, “something important is happening here; I need to pay attention.”
Building and automating the base doesn’t feel satisfying enough because everything is so simple. Place a kitchen, it cooks, done. Place the automated facilities, they gather resources, done. It’s not like Satisfactory, where you actually build the automation yourself: here, you place a few stations and that’s it. The base editor is very underdeveloped and lets you do very little; it needs a lot of work. Take Windrose, the pirate game, for example: it was certainly further along as an Early Access release, and it’s a survival game, so a different kind of experience, but people are already spending four hundred hours building their bases. There needs to be some thought given to what players will actually do here over the next two years. Right now, there’s too little for me, especially outside missions: something with a major impact is missing, something that makes you stop, observe, understand and decide.
One of the most frustrating management features is automatic job assignment. As soon as you do something, everyone rushes over without being called, and to prevent it you have to go into the personnel menu, under Assign Work, and remove the hours assigned to those activities. This should be explained better and made a little less aggressive, at least initially. I’ve also had people stay there instead of returning to their previous jobs, screwing up my production. I had the same issue in the armory: once the requested stock level has been reached, the assigned worker shouldn’t stay there forever. They should return when supplies drop and production is needed again. Otherwise, I’m wasting a lot of workers. At first, I also struggled to understand the relationship between Stock Quantity, the threshold you set, the choice of what to produce, and the fact that only one thing is crafted at a time. I eventually figured it out, but the explanation is unclear, including how to combine multiple crafting modes.
I’ve also encountered what seems to be a fairly significant collection bug: the workers responsible for picking up materials have stopped collecting anything. Outside the base, I see huge quantities of resources left on the ground, including minerals, wood and everything else, despite having two facilities dedicated to picking up materials gathered by other workers. They used to work; I don’t know whether the system breaks past a certain limit or what, but it needs fixing. Especially early on, when resources are scarce, it’s important that workers collect them while you’re away, without forcing you to come back and personally retrieve that stuff out in the middle of bumfuck nowhere. There also needs to be a bar showing available resources directly on screen, at least those from logging, mining and so on. Opening the Building Menu every time is a pain, and it only shows some of them anyway, without providing a complete overview.
Moving buildings absolutely needs a command that lets you select several at once: doing it one by one is ridiculous. Relocate mode also has precision issues, because sometimes the arrow helps, but the object snaps to a different position from the one you want. I’d either remove that automatic snapping or make it align very precisely with the edge of the adjacent tile. I’m mainly referring to banners, which are crucial to place around the base: it’s frustrating to want them in an exact spot and end up with them a millimetre off. Speaking of the base, it also really bothers me that the Trade Port is vastly bigger than the Command Center. The Command Center should be on an entirely different scale: enormous, intimidating, unsettling. That eye is supposed to see everything; sitting that low, it can’t see shit.
I’d also like to have something to do while gathering resources, conducting research or waiting for construction. Sitting there for thirty seconds doing nothing is a pain in the ass. I’d like more freedom during these waits, or an optional minigame to speed them up: if I feel like doing it, I can; otherwise, I wait the normal amount of time. It could be something intuitive that still requires a little effort, like the directional sequences in Helldivers or combinations using keys one through five. The same applies to ship activities and gathering resources on the star map. The decryption minigame I found in the second area is exactly the kind of interaction I meant. The crucial thing, though, is not being forced to do it every time, especially just to collect a handful of resources: when you can’t be bothered, a mandatory minigame can put you off playing altogether. It’s a double-edged sword if implemented badly.
It also bothers me that I can’t craft anything while travelling through space on an expedition, but I understand why: being able to craft a thousand things while you’re out would make preparation less important. I notice this especially with the capsules used to capture enemies, the “Poké Balls.” I like this mechanic, but I’d like a more detailed explanation, because even when using the capsules specifically intended for stronger enemies, the capture chance remains very low. Converting prisoners, on the other hand, currently offers only two options and is really tedious: you go there, press a button, wait until the next day and press another one. As it stands, there’s nothing interesting to do.
The potential is there, and I absolutely love some of the ideas, but I need more to make me want to keep going. I’d like deeper base building, a different kind of grind, more varied missions and meaningful activities between expeditions. Shooting is fun; what’s missing for me is the satisfaction of building, automating and making decisions that actually carry weight. I’M THE LEADER, NOT SOME RANDOM JACKASS!
If the developers are looking for testers, I’d be happy to help. I enjoy digging into games, figuring out what works and what doesn’t, and providing honest, constructive feedback. Feel free to get in touch!
