How do you fake the server in working locally on a microservices app?

If you're application reaches out to diversified end points all over the place what can you do? I'm in this situation now, and in our environment unfortunately we are just hitting the API endpoints of QA servers and if they are messed up we can't work! At most jobs there is a way to fake the environment locally. Devs will have a local database, etc. How do we do this for microservices architecture? Have a secondary app with endpoints to hit and reroute URLs there by doctoring up your hosts file? It has been suggested that really the application should talk into a broker service which then makes a call out to the meat of things or perhaps a messaging bus if not a broker service. I guess that approach adds a layer of fat and thus a performance hit.