The game, taking place in the future, on a new planet, is open-ended where the player character is a planetary governor who evacuated his colony after it was hit by a biological weapon by an alien race.

Instead of being reprimanded or fired, the governor is lauded for his care of colonists' lives over material gain, and promoted to a series of pioneer worlds to colonize.

It is the player's task to colonize the new planet, manage the colony and raise the quality of life for the citizen in order to reach utopia.

Certain buildings require personnel (hospitals, labs, mines, factories, shipyards ...) and therefore the player has to engage in population management.

It is possible to completely eradicate the alien race, after which the game loses its combat aspect and becomes a pure management simulation.

The scenarios are named according to the alien races in the Amiga version and according to the planets in the SNES port: A data disk called Utopia: The New Worlds was later released by Gremlin.

[1] Work on Utopia began after the completion of Spacewrecked: 14 Billion Light Years From Earth, and was inspired by Sim City.

[1] The main differentiating design choice was to have a 'more involved' social model, rather than center Utopia's gameplay around the city-building aspect.

[1] Each alien race has differing AI routines, but the level of detail put into their development was limited by memory restrictions, with Ing expressing that "it's a trade-off really.

[1] A user-friendly UI was an important aspect in Utopia's development, and Ing expresses that "nothing annoys me more than a product which is graphically good but in which it's difficult for the player to grasp the controls.

The One praises Utopia's graphics and sound, noting a feature where the soundtrack changes depending on the player's performance in-game, and calls the game's isometric perspective "pleasing to the eye".