Sometimes, it’s best to let a game speak for itself. Apropos, here are two instances of FPS/base building strategy hybrid Pax Autocratica on Pax Autocratica. Let’s call them ‘shot’ and ‘chaser’. Here’s the shot:
“[Multiverse studio] builds games meant to be genuinely fun while making a positive impact on players and society, an aim that continues with Pax Autocratica and its satirical look at the cost of authoritarian power…We’re building this game to let players interrogate power, not glorify it.”
And here’s the chaser:
If you look at the fourth item in the planned feature list, you’ll spot “soldier/player sexual relationships’. At this point, you may be interested to know that there are two ways to recruit soldiers in the game. The most reliable, and the one the game explains in the tutorial, is to capture enemy fighters using a special type of ammunition, build prisons, incarcerate, torture, then convert them.
So, let’s sum up, shall we? The envisioned full release of the game – a “satirical look at authoritarian power” – looks very much to include a feature that lets you capture and imprison soldiers (with, I should add, cute anime-adjacent potraits), break their will through electroshock torture, indoctrinate them to your regime, and then sleep with them.
I….think our definitions of “interrogating power” might be slightly different, Pax Autocratica.
Satire is notoriously tricky to get right, but before I call Pax Autocratica bad satire, I’d better give my definitions. To me, a successful satire of power itself strips power from the corrupt by reminding us poor frogs that the water wasn’t always so unbearably hot – by reframing banal evils as rightfully absurd. Adopt too much ironic distance, deny the appeal or power of whatever you’re satirising, and you end with something broad and impotent. Sketch your target too loosely, or blunt the specifics, it becomes toothless and trite.
Successful satire is unflinching, and if it cannot be funny, it at least needs to be dedicated to the bit. To pick something apart, you first need to depict it honestly, which isn’t always the easiest sell to an audience seeking entertainment. Defamiliarisation is metamorphosis, and metamorphosis is uncomfortable. It also adds additional complications. The film Starship Troopers tackles the problem of ironic distance by being such a fun, quotable bit of military sci-fi that, to this day, it remains indistinguishable to some of its audience from a celebration of the very fascistic militarism it aims to criticise. Many of original author Robert Heinlein’s actual opinions are so farcically jingoistic and warbrained that merely depicting them without comment feels like searing critique, but only if you already find them disagreeable.
Adding further perilous slack to this tightrope is the unfortunate fact that, whether through sheer unwillingness or just inability to recognise it, some people are plain immune to satire in the first place. Jordan Peterson has been known to quote Voltaire’s “best of all possible worlds” without a trace of irony, and you’ll still find people that refuse to accept that Warhammer 40k’s comically dystopian Imperium of Man isn’t meant to be aspirational.
Pax Autocratica is not a good satire of authoritarian regimes. At its best, it’s a mildly amusing application of third-hand evil empire tropes, content to gesture at broad signifiers of despotic power in the way an Austin Powers film might. You build grandiose statues depicting your peaked cap-wearing, mecha-ubermensch avatar. You research and enact surveillance or worker’s rights bills to manage your soldier’s fear and loyalty, choosing a path of either benevolence or tyranny – aesthetic choices with no real difference in consequences, just linear upgrades up binary research trees.
Perhaps this is a problem of early access that’ll get fine tuned later, but there’s currently so little tension or threat in the base building portion of the game, and such little incentive to run a tyrannical dictatorship over a benevolent one, that you can avoid many of the overtly authoritarian choices altogether. There’s also not a trace of something like Frostpunk’s sense of being backed into a corner before you implement these systems. It all feels so incidental.
As I said above – satire is difficult. Under most circumstances, it’d be no catastrophic failure on Pax Autocratica’s part that it’s not a good satire of authoritarian regimes, in the same way that I don’t hold it against Two Point Hospital for not being a good satire of private healthcare. I’m honestly just floored at the utter pretension of claiming a “positive impact on players and society” while promising systems that use weak satire as a smokescreen for rewarding the player for being a reprehensible piece of shit.
I truly believe that no human evil should be off-limits for depiction in art, but mates, you’re not Horses and you’re not Atwood or Nabokov either. I’m simply not convinced that the game is smart enough to tackle state-sponsored sexual coercion with any grace or insight. One of the buildings you can unlock is named the ‘reproductive allocation facility’. It’s described as a “designated facility…tasked with regulating intimate relationships among base soldiers to ensure demographic stability”. So, what is it? A forced breeding clinic? The game is vague and apparently squeamish about what it’s actually depicting here, while still depicting it for…what? Shock value? Titillation? Because, as I’ve said, just gesturing at something awful isn’t how satire works. Not brave enough to interrogate this stuff? Fine. Don’t include it.
Is Pax Autocratica at least a compelling management game? Not especially, no. To give a top-level view, you’re working towards a more powerful avatar to tackle increasingly challenging combat encounters on space expeditions. This means acquiring better equipment and more numerous and powerful soldiers, which means researching, building, and managing a base capable of producing that equipment. Along the way, you’ll also need to train, feed, house, and keep those soldiers happy.
Aside from setting up a basic resource chain, which you’ll achieve and automate within around half an hour and barely have to think about again, this all boils down to a simple core loop. You go to space, collect resources, return, upgrade some core structures, unlock more structures, build as much as you can before you run out of resources, then go to space again. You’ve only ever got a few building options at a time, and there are few optimisation tweaks to make, so decision making is sparse and simple. This is never more apparent than when you’re staring at a five minute timer for your next piece of research, with absolutely nothing to do except listen to your soldiers walk around and chirp banal dialogue to each other.
Ok, fine. But is Pax Autocratica at least a good FPS? That’s the meat of the game, right? A generous slathering of the very best bullets can save anything – so goes the eternal videogame promise. At this point, I’d like you to imagine I am starting to say the word “well” but get snagged on the ‘e’, drawing it out so long that stars begin to fall from the sky and boil the ocean. It’s…fine, is what it is. I wouldn’t willingly choose it over an actually good FPS, but it does do some things I quite liked in context.
It’s enjoyably manic, for one. Gunfights throw a tonne of enemies at you, but they all go down pretty easily. You’ve got a quick dash, which is largely pointless because most enemies use hitscan weapons, but zipping around does add the chaos. Guns feel and sound decent in that tinny and plinky looter-shooter way, although many have a frustratingly low ammo count for how quickly they fire. You’ll also find roguelike-style upgrade booths along the way. They’re mostly dull, but you’ll occasionally get one that, say, randomly launches rockets at whoever your fighting, or chucks out poison clouds. Again, the excessiveness and chaos is the combat’s saving grace.
You’ll spend each expedition zipping around a galactic map, mining for resources, visiting shops, and taking on combat challenges until you’ve hit a high enough completion percentage to take on the final encounter. You don’t have to tackle it immediately, but enemies get tougher the longer you spend faffing about. Final encounters are huge battles across sweeping plains where you’re joined by dozens of friendly units and vehicles. You can issue them a few simple, such as ‘go here’, or ‘shoot that’, which they sometimes even respond to. After you’ve finished a couple of expeditions in a sector, you’ll face a boss for your third. The first boss is effectively mecha-Donkey Kong. He is the best thing about Pax Autocratica, as is the case for many games that include a monkey in any capacity.
Pax Autocratica currently feels like a game damned by its own diffuse ambitions. Between the combat, the strategy, the base building, and the expeditions, I’m impressed by just how much the game tries to tackle, but there’s no one system that’s notable or even especially enjoyable in isolation. Nothing sticks, and it obviously doesn’t help that it’s built itself some very slippery walls. I can overlook a great deal of mediocrity in service of well-executed themes or genuinely funny and incisive writing, but there’s precious little of that here either. What else to say? Your weapon factory is shaped like a pistol. That’s fun. The black and red colour scheme is also very striking! But I can get that from looking at a ladybug, and it at least won’t try to claim it’s “interrogating power” while it devours a family of aphids.
