PAX West 2025: Muse Games re-enters the co-op space with Stars of Icarus at just the right time

In 2012, my friends and I took a break from jumping between Team Fortress 2 servers to try something different from the competitive norm that we'd been stuck in for the last few years. We hopped into something so unlike the games we'd played before, something that required genuine teamwork: a game called Guns of Icarus Online.

I can't tell you for sure, but I think that game offered the kind of co-operative play that we're still chasing all these years after. It's the kind of game that sowed the seeds that have blossomed into the love we have for games like R.E.P.O., Lethal Company, and PEAK.

This year at PAX West, Muse Games was letting players go hands-on with their latest game, Stars of Icarus, the successor to the iconic Icarus franchise that looks to refine the formula and re-establish the developer in the team-based PvP space.

We had a chance to both play the demo and chat with Howard Tsao, Team Lead at Muse Games, and we're so ready to fall all the way back in love with the series all these years later.

​Just the Facts

Developer: Muse Games

Genre: Co-op competitive spaceship battler

Release Date: TBA 2026

Stars of Icarus is the follow-up to the Guns of Icarus series of games that started as far back as 2010 and saw the last game in the series release in 2017 with Guns of Icarus Alliance. In the time since, Muse Games has cut their teeth with a ton of co-op focused games like the firefighting Embr and the survival crafting environmental-focused Wildmender, both designed for up to four players.

"Guns of Icarus was a teamwork-focused PvP steampunk airship combat game," explained Tsao as we met in front of the small corner booth with its many stations for 3v3 play on the PAX West show floor. "And [Stars of Icarus] is kind of the next evolution."

Ditching the steam for high-powered starships, Stars of Icarus sees the series take to the stars. It's all '80s and '90s anime-inspired flair, with players hopping into the cockpit and blasting each other to bits in the vacuum of space. The biggest change since Guns comes in the form of slimming down and simplifying, replacing the massive multiship battles for up to 32 players with to more focused 5v5 matchups. There's already a ton to think about in a game like this, as players operate specific parts of the ship and bounce around to repair and maintain things like guns, shields, and engines.

For long-term fans who might flinch at the change, I'll note that Muse Games is looking into offering double that, 10v10 matchups, for community servers — but makes no promises this early on as they tinker with the performance strain that matches of that size can bring.

Muse Games is also looking to offer greater flexibility with their ships. A key difference from Guns does away with having a fixed-size ship operated by four people. Instead, Stars of Icarus offers varied ship sizes and asymmetry that plays into team composition in cool ways. You can fly anything from a single-seat fighter up to a three-person starship. This makes team tactics and strategy more dynamic as you mix and match team composition.

In our demo session, Julie and I hopped into a two-person ship where I piloted and Julie did everything else — manning the guns and running about to make repairs. It was refreshing to know we could still contribute to the team dynamic as our usual duo, instead of feeling like we had to learn the intricacies of full team play right out of the gate.

When asked about lessons learned from Guns that are making it into Stars, Tsao said, “I think this time around we built in more flexibility. For people who want to be a little bit more lone wolf, but still support the team, they can. With 5v5 as a minimum, it's just a little bit easier to form teams, a little bit more freeform.”

It was a way to get people into games quicker, to potentially eliminate the need for AI teammates like the old games often needed, and to create a little more action in the shift away from steam and toward a faster-paced vibe. That said, even our two-person ship saw a little boost with Stars of Icarus' automatons. Most ships come equipped with them — little robots that can be assigned to parts of the ship to either work the guns, repair and maintain modules, or otherwise keep things moving when you and your teammates are busy.

We talked with Tsao about the efforts to make Stars of Icarus a bit more approachable, particularly in the high-octane, ship-flipping chaos that comes with the shift to space. He emphasized that a lot of these structural changes, and a more immediately engaging tutorial, would do a lot of the heavy lifting. Getting players onto a ship, letting them go hands-on, and offering them a ton of ways to engage in a match would make learning naturally a bit easier.

Maybe you cut your teeth in a single seat ship, or have a friend lead you in a two-seater, for a few matches before feeling like you can contribute to the team effort in something bigger. Our demo session was quick, a little frantic, and may have ended in a loss — but it felt fairly manageable from the start, for the simple fact that our ship was just the two of us.

In our PAX West demo session, we played the "Bounty" mode, which exemplifies the effort to balance the scales for players of all kinds. Every ship is assigned a dollar value at the start of the round. That number goes up for every kill you manage and goes down every time you die. This means that any round can turn drastically if your team manages to knock out the top-scoring opponent; and if you're still trying to figure things out and wind up dying a few times, the depreciated "value" of your ship makes you much less of a target.

For most of our round, Julie and I were really just getting our legs under us. I took on the pilot's role and got used to the full six degrees of freedom, rolling around and overclocking our thrusters to get into a fight. I flew through cloudy space that messed up our targeting to make sure Julie could lock onto our opponents, while they hopped from gun to gun to fire off shots. But we were overwhelmed by the three-player enemy team that employed the same two-person ship alongside one single-seater to chip away at us consistently.

To really understand the systems at work here, we definitely needed more time, but the potential was immediately obvious — calling out commands back and forth, throttling up to position us well for some good potshots, looking around the cockpit to spot the speedy single-seater that flew across our view again and again. Muse Games may only be getting started, but the promise set up by the Icarus series years ago is already paying off with the Stars of Icarus demo we played.

Tsao told us as he looked on at the latest group whooping and cheering in Stars' little booth, where players destroyed each other's starships, "This is really our debut show. I know we announced it at the PC Gaming Show, but that is really just a trailer. This is the first time that people can get their hands on it, you know, to have hands-on experiences with the game, which we're super excited about." As the battle raged on behind us, Tsao watched on, seemingly logging reactions and player energy in real time. Muse Games really cares about this, and it's clear in the energy of the staff running the booth, in the way Tsao answered our questions, and in how he hopped into our demo session to help us with our fight when things looked off-balance.

Guns of Icarus may have been one of the games that opened the door to the kinds of experiences me and my friends chase after today, but Stars of Icarus is walking through that same doorway nearly 13 years later to remind us of our roots and show what all that experience can bring to the multiplayer space with something brand new in 2026.

If you want to keep up with the game, check out their Discord and wishlist the game on Steam!

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Thanks for reading our coverage direct from the PAX West show floor. If you found it interesting and want to read more hands-on game previews and interviews with developers, visit our PAX West articles. Or check out our recap stream for a behind-the-scenes on what we did, played, and saw during all four days of PAX.