Interstellar Utopia preview: No Man’s Sky meets EVE Online, but to what end?

Of all the games I played at Gamescom 2025, Interstellar Utopia felt the most like a prototype or a proof of concept. In fact, I struggle to really place it inside a single genre. Remember what we all thought No Man’s Sky would be before it was released? This massive, seamless universe in which we’d meet other players and find their creations? That’s one thing Interstellar Utopia aims for. But its thinking is even more ambitious: Tencent Games is throwing EVE Online into the mix by adding a galactic market, scarcity of goods, and guilds that can take control of entire planets and field fleets to fight massive PvP space battles against rivals. You can even be a space pirate and steal other people’s ships, apparently.

Oh, and all of this runs on your phone. I saw it at the event. Sure, it was rough around the edges and the PC version looked miles better, but it was a shocking reminder of what modern phones are capable of. Playing Honkai: Star Rail and Umamusume is the extent of what I do with mine.

Like in No Man’s Sky, you have your own ship to fly around the galaxy with. You can explore as much as you want, seamlessly land on planets to extract resources or mine asteroids for what you need. NPC lifeforms and ships populate the universe. You can build bases, of course, but you can simply pack them up and plop them back down on a different planet, which is neat.

There is already a sizable selection of different ships from small fightercraft to larger freighters (with fully modeled interiors, by the way) and different playable characters in the game.

The latter includes a generic anime wife with purple hair, a chimpanzee, and an intelligent alien octopus, which apparently was the most popular pick among visitors at the showfloor. I mean, the guy folds up into a ball to move around, what’s not to love?

You extract, build, and fight like you would in NMS, and then there’s the MMO aspect, but a lot more details still remain a mystery. The most frequent answer I got when asking questions was “We’re still thinking about that” or “We’re currently considering how to do that.”

Which is partly why, as I mentioned above, Interstellar Utopia felt so much like a prototype. There is this honestly very impressive technical foundation that can simulate an entire universe in the palm of your hand, but it looks like the studio isn’t quite sure what to do with it at the moment. Sure, five years ago it would have been enough to simply release a game like No Man’s Sky (the promised version, that is) to challenge the real thing. But today, NMS is beloved. All the false promises and lies are forgotten, buried under years of hard work and free content updates that redeemed Hello Games in the eyes of fans and critics alike.

Interstellar Utopia is clearly a very ambitious project — its scale alone is enough to say that. It feels like the game still lacks a hook besides that, though. Anyone enjoying the exploration of NMS already has access to an excellent product, while EVE players already have that title as their second job. But there’s still time. Interstellar Utopia has no release window and the devs can presumably cook however long they need, given Tencent’s infinite resources.

I do hope they’ll address the game’s controls as they work on it in any case. The PC version didn’t have any hotkeys when I played and instead forced you to use the mobile version’s action wheel for pretty much anything, from summoning your ship and putting on your vacuum suit to ejecting during combat. Naturally, that’s a big no-no — but it’s also a small detail compared to the bigger questions Interstellar Utopia has to find an answer for first.

Developed by Tencent Games, Interstellar Utopia is planned to come to PC, iOS, and Android.

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