Thank you to Dovetail Games for providing us with a Deluxe Edition review code!

They're stressed out, and they're running late;
Shunting trucks sounded so great.
Who's the driver? Not a clue;
The most thankless member of the crew!

Couple cars and drive away,
Don't go too fast, you'll fly to space.
Missed a signal? Try again!
Thomas and his frieeeeends!

Thomas the Tank Engine is a character and a series that needs no introduction. It's a name that transcends generational barriers and fuels nostalgia like special Sodor coal. I watched the old TV series some growing up, and all four of my children have experienced Thomas in some form or another. My eldest daughter referred to the classic series as "decowate Thomas" when she was little because they looked like the "decorations" they weren't allowed to touch when in public, and my youngest son still falls asleep listening to the songs from the latest animated Thomas series, All Engines GO! So when the opportunity arose for CCG to review a brand new game all about playing as the most popular engines and driving around Sodor like a real train conductor, I jumped at the opportunity. Not only did I want to play it for myself, I wanted to give my kids an opportunity to try it and see if they would like it. All this to say, I came into this experience as a fan wholly excited to take on this experience. What I found, though, was a very mixed bag, to say the least. In just about every category, this game does some things remarkably well, and others very poorly.

Thomas & Friends™: Wonders of Sodor is a very realistic train simulator game. The developer and publisher, Dovetail Games, is also the developer and publisher of the Train Sim World series; Train Sim World 6 just released last September. Wonders of Sodor, according to the game's official website is built on top of Train Sim World, which itself is built using Unreal Engine. In the game, players play as an engine driver that can take control of one of 5 engines: Thomas, Percy, Gordon, Emily, or Diesel. That roster is increased to 6 if the player purchases the $16.99 DLC for James.

The game offers 3 main modes: Stories, Timetable, and Explore. The Stories are just that: Stories lifted straight from the pages of the old books, narrated and voiced by a single reader, just like the classic TV series. In these stories, between cutscene dialog between the characters, players will travel from location to location, actually performing the jobs or tasks that the characters would have done in the books, such as racing against Bertie the Bus or running the branch line like a real engine would. These stories are nice and tend to offer a simple way of getting into the game. In them, the player doesn't need to worry about things like manually switching rails or keeping to a strict travel schedule. These stories were usually very enjoyable and relaxing. Some of them can take upward of an hour to complete.

By direct contrast, several "Stories" are actually "Shunting Challenges". These challenges have a series of cars spread across several tracks in the shunting yard off the main line, and you are tasked with taking a subset of the cars from the yard and coupling them in the correct order. In these challenges, you need to manually decouple your cars, manually switch the tracks, and really watch your speed. Moving too fast when coupling the cars will cause a derailment (which causes the physics to go haywire and for cars to tumble off nonsensically or sail into low Earth orbit). Setting the railroad switches the wrong way can also derail you. The first time I attempted a shunting challenge it took me no less than 6 tries to do it right. I also found the instructions to be a little unclear and had one attempt where I had the cars in order but had other cars in between them and thought that should have been fine; that could just be my lack of understanding alone, though. To add insult to injury, the opening narration tells you to do the challenge in as few moves as possible to improve your score. Spoiler: there is no score given at the end of the challenge.

The game's website claims this is "A FAITHFUL RECREATION OF SODOR". For the locations you are able to go to, it certainly feels that way. Many of the stations from the series are here, like Knapford, Ffarquhar, Cronk, and Vicarstown. However, something I had really wanted to be able to do was go down to Brendam docks and see the cranes; Cranky is a favored character in this house. That area simply doesn't exist in this game as it stands right now. I'm sure it's not reasonable to expect the game to be a 1:1 recreation of the entire island, but it was a bit of a disappointment for me.

The trains themselves are marvelously detailed. The inside of each cab is properly modelled after the real life inspirations for each engine (at least, I presume so; I don't actually know that much about trains). Howver, this is the first PC game I've played since upgrading my graphics card from an AMD R9 390 to an nVidia RTX 3070. Not exactly screaming hot, top of the line, I know, but it's a huge jump. And yet, so much of the background of this game feels flat and uninteresting. I tried running the game at Ultra settings, and it lagged pretty badly. It ran much better one step down at High settings, but I couldn't even tell the difference between the two. The various people you meet are also not quite so detailed. The game also switches back and forth as to whether or not NPCs' mouths move when they talk. When they do, the movements don't match the dialog at all. Weirdly, during cutscenes, the NPC that is talking is almost always out of focus. It is a bug the developers are aware of and say they are working on.

The controls take a bit of getting used to, but that's a given. As someone who has never played a realistic train simulator game, it took some time to get a handle on just how much time these metal behemoths need to come to a stop. You can really feel the difference in power between a shunting car like Thomas and an express train like Gordon. You can also really feel the difference in how long it takes to start or stop based on how many cars are coupled to the engine. All of this feels great. As a nice touch, when using a controller, the rumble matches the clacking of the wheels on the track as you travel, and it's just the perfect cherry on top.

Where the controls fall flat is mostly in the dichotomy between keyboard and mouse vs. controller. The controls are not identical between them. For example, on keyboard, pressing 1, 2, or 3 will give you one of 3 different camera angles: first person inside the cab, wide angle outside, or near angle outside. In none of these modes can you freely move the camera from its position, only turn its angle. By contrast, on the controller, pressing R3 will toggle between the first person perspective of the driver and popping the camera outside the cab. When outside, the camera moves along with the train, but the player can freely move the camera along all 3 axes within a fixed distance from the train. Both methods of camera control have pros and cons, but the fact that they aren't identical between the two control schemes means that, unless you have both keyboard/mouse and a controller hooked up, you will only be able to use a subset of the camera controls.

Further, there are unlisted controls. For example, in controller mode, pressing R2 is the throttle, and pressing R3 changes the camera. However, pressing them together raises the camera vertically. This behavior is not listed, stops the throttle control while in use, and doesn't have a clear opposite for moving the camera back down. There were also moments where the camera appeared to zoom in while using the controller, and then I couldn't get it to zoom back out without grabbing my mouse and scrolling the scroll wheel down. It's all just enough to be confusing and annoying.

Things like weather, wind, and slope gradient all play an effect on how well the player can start and stop. There even appear to be physics built in for the Troublesome Trucks in some Stories, where they can try to push or pull the engine more than normal, forcing the player to really keep a tight rein on the speed. While I like the idea, in practice, I never got the hang of dealing with all of these factors. Something about the way the camera is angled really makes it hard to tell if you're on terrain that isn't flat, and so the train just feels like it isn't responding properly sometimes. I think this wouldn't have felt so bad if not for the host of bugs I experienced, but I'll get into that later.

In the pause menu, there is no "Return to Game" or "Unpause" option to select; you can only return to the game by pressing the same button that brings up the pause menu. This is an unusual choice on its own; virtually all video games have conditioned players to expect the top item in the pause menu to be a selectable option to return to the game. But what takes this from "odd" to "masochistic" is that the default, automatically-selected option when entering the pause menu is "Restart". That means, if you're near the end of an hour-long story, pause to do something, and then do the reflexive thing of pressing the "Accept" button on your controller without thinking about it, you'll lose all of your progress and start over.

But my number one, absolute top, hands down complaint about the controls is the lack of a button to skip dialog or cutscenes. This infuriates me every time I see it in a game. When I had my kids gather round to try and play this for the first time, my 2 year old kept grabbing at the keyboard and made me quit out of the tutorial level 3 times. And each time I went back into the level, I had to sit through the same 2-minute spiel from Sir Topham Hat and Thomas about the game. And this wouldn't be the only time something caused me to have to restart a level, each time with the same frustration of sitting through the opening cutscene with no ability to skip through. There is no excuse for that, and there never has been in all of gaming history. Moving on.

The sound design is one area in which I have little complaint. There is essentially no music outside of the main menu and title menu, sticking with the simulator vibes of just letting the world exist in its own ambience. This leaves you with the comforting sounds of the train on the rails, the screeching of wheels when you hit the brakes, the satisfying steam venting when you come to a stop, and the whistle that you can blow as much or as little as you like. As previously mentioned, Wonders of Sodor takes a page from the classic TV series and has all of the dialog voiced by a single person. They do a good job of giving different voices and personalities to each character.

Unfortunately, and area in which I have many complaints are the bugs. The notes from Dovetail Games have a list of bugs they already knew about at the time they gave us the game to review, with some being listed "High Priority and will be fixed before or just after Launch", and others as lower priority. However, it's now been over three weeks since the game's launch, and there has not been an update yet. The game is on multiple platforms, so I'm sure patches are more complex than just fixing a couple bugs and sending out the patch, but it is a little concerning that this many items were known about from before launch and there hasn't been anything yet.

I will only list the bugs here I saw personally, but what I experienced was already enough, and I experienced many that weren't even listed by Dovetail Games:
- The game crashed once for no clear reason
- The camera kept going under the map when doing Emily's Story
- Sometimes the speedometer reads 0mph when slowing down before you've actually stopped
- Sometimes the game lets you stop meters away from the checkpoint location; sometimes it expects you to stop directly on it
- You can open doors that are marked as "locked"
- The label on the button to start the game on the title page is out of alignment
- Using the mouse to move the map is bugged and the map kept flying away from my mouse when I let go of right-click
- Moused-over items in the map blink rapidly
- Certain things can cause the game to stop updating checkpoints and quests, so you can't progress without restarting. I had to quit 40 minutes into Thomas' Timetable due to this.
- Distance markers are marked from the train's engine, but in reverse, the game wants you to stop with your final engine on the marker, so the distance is inaccurate.
- UI elements further back sit in front of UI elements that are nearer, which is especially infuriating in the shunting challenges
- Sometimes the brakes get stuck on and you have to tap them again to get them to release.
- In one instance, distance to the next point stopped being measured by how far I needed to travel on the rails and instead was distance "as the crow flies"

But the worst bugs all came from Percy's shunting challenge. During that scenario, I had issues decoupling cars unless I went to a different car, looked at its coupling, then came back to the car I actually wanted to decouple. I had an issue where, after decoupling Percy, he suddenly started moving again; I was outside of him, manually decoupling, when this happened, and you can't jump onto a moving train, so he just coasted on wards at 2mph until he hit a buffer and then derailed in comical fashion. After restarting the challenge yet again, I had an issue where Percy accelerated out of control, even when I was holding the brakes and was off the throttle, until Percy finally derailed again. I didn't bother trying the challenge again after that.

The one moral issue mentioned in the ESRB rating likely comes from the fact that, in the main menu, there is an entire page dedicated to showing other Dovetail Games games, sales, and DLC for purchase. The game also asks you to sign in to your Dovetail account when you first launch it, though you can skip this and have it never appear again, if you wish. Otherwise, the game is free from any moral concerns.

Now all of this was my own experience, but as I mentioned, I also wanted my kids to take part in it. So how did they fare? I had 3 of them try it: my toddler son, who's nearly 3; and my two middle-aged children, a boy and a girl, the older of whom just turned 7. Well, for youngest, this game was definitely above his capabilities. Given that this game is meant to be an accurate train simulator, that's to be expected, but given that he's the one of the age I would say Thomas is most closely marketed to, he's the one I was most hopeful would be able to play a Thomas game. My older daughter had some trepidation with the train's speed when she played, inching forward to platforms at a snails pace for fear of overrunning it. She was ultimately the one least interested in it. That leaves my older son. He actually managed all right in the Story that he played, getting a decent handle on speeds and stopping distances, moreso than I expected. On the other hand, he also was trying to do silly things like jump off moving trains and run through stop signals; I suspect that this game wouldn't hold his interest for long and that things like the Timetables or Shunting Challenges would be more than he would want to try to do.

Thomas has always seemed to me to be most interesting for younger, preschool-aged boys. Middle-aged children might still have some interest, and mine were eager for a chance to at least try the game. But Wonders of Sodor is not a game that is just for children. It's very clearly marketed for an older audience. The skills necessary to perform the more complex tasks are not things I would expect anyone younger than a teenager to be able to perform. That means the game is mostly going to be for the very niche crowd of older Thomas enthusiasts who also dream of being able to drive them across Sodor in a hyper-realistic simulation environment. The Stories being pulled directly from the old books gives the feeling of trying to be a gateway for younger kids to get into the game, but overall just makes it feel like the game isn't sure who it's marketing to.

Thomas & Friends™: Wonders of Sodor fills a very, very specific niche. When it works, it provides a relaxing and nostalgic experience. However, the odd controls, graphical issues, and bugs are an oily stain on what should be a polished product. Add to that the fact that the game released with one of the 6 engines locked behind an extra DLC paywall, and the overall experience is more likely to bust your buffers. If you're an older gamer whose passion is trains, then this game might be for you; it does have a "Very Positive" rating on Steam, so that has to mean something. Otherwise, it's not one I'd spend $40+ on.

-maestro_dana