Thomas & Friends: Wonders of Sodor

The Island of Sodor, Finally Built to Scale

Thomas & Friends has been adapted into dozens of games over four decades, but never quite like this. Wonders of Sodor, developed and published by Dovetail Games on the Train Sim World engine, released on March 17, 2026 as the first attempt to give the franchise a proper open, drivable island rather than a series of short, scripted levels. Reviewers who grew up with the Railway Series books, the original model-era television show, or the later CGI seasons describe a similar reaction: genuine disbelief that an official, dedicated Thomas train sim finally exists, paired with real emotion at being able to drive Thomas and his friends across a Sodor built from Reverend Wilbert Awdry's own hand-drawn relief map. At the time of writing, the review base sits comfortably positive, and the throughline in almost every account, positive or critical, is the same: this is clearly a labour of love that doesn't yet live up to its own ambition.

That tension defines the game. Dovetail has spent years building increasingly detailed, increasingly expensive train simulators for an adult hobbyist audience, and Wonders of Sodor is, structurally, still one of those games underneath the cartoon paint job. It inherits Train Sim World's cab-driving, signal-following, physics-based approach to running a railway, then wraps it in Thomas's world of talking engines, animated faces, and gentle children's-show storytelling. For a meaningful slice of the audience, that combination is exactly the point: several reviewers describe having modded other train sims for years trying to recreate a Thomas experience and finally getting the real thing. For others, it's a mismatch that makes the game unsure of who it's actually for, too methodical and rule-bound for young children, too simple and content-light for hardened train sim veterans, and caught in an uncomfortable middle ground that doesn't fully satisfy either.

Stories, Shunting, and a Living Timetable

The base game ships with four distinct ways to play. Story mode retells scenarios pulled from the Railway Series and classic TV episodes, putting players directly in the cab for moments fans have only ever watched happen to Thomas, Gordon, Percy, Diesel, and Emily, complete with narration from veteran Thomas voice actor Mark Moraghan that reviewers consistently call the game's best single asset. Shunting Challenges task players with sorting numbered trucks through a yard's tangle of points and sidings, and reviewers who enjoy that puzzle-like precision describe it as a genuine highlight, a Thomas vs. Diesel showdown gets called out by name in more than one review as unexpectedly tense and satisfying. Timetable mode hands each engine a full day's worth of scheduled runs to complete at a relaxed pace, while Explore mode opens the island for freer driving, provided a destination is set through the map first. Layered on top are collectibles, scattered Railway Series books, photographs, and conductor's whistles, that reward wandering the map and give completionists something to chase beyond the story's roughly four-to-eight-hour runtime.

The map itself earns consistent praise. Reviewers who've compared it directly to Awdry's original relief map note the attention paid to getting Sodor's geography right, even as the actual mileage is compressed for playability, the main line runs closer to seventeen miles rather than the eighty implied by the books. Knapford, Tidmouth, the quarry line, and the harbour all get called out as faithfully realised, and the blend of Railway Series, classic-model, and CGI-era visual details is repeatedly described as a thoughtful compromise rather than a compromise that pleases no one. Multiple reviewers who came in skeptical, expecting a cheap license cash-in, say the sheer care evident in the map alone changed their mind about the project's sincerity, even when the rest of the game let them down.

A Railway That Refuses to Bend

Where the goodwill runs out fastest is the signal system. Wonders of Sodor treats a passed red signal, a slightly hard bump into stationary trucks, or a missed stop the same way Train Sim World does: as an instant, session-ending failure, with no sandbox toggle to turn the rules off. Reviewers hammer this point with unusual consistency, one calls it "overly punishing" and notes the irony of a Thomas game refusing to let players recreate the bumps, scrapes, and pratfalls that are core to the show's own sense of humour, pointing out that Thomas & Friends has an entire beloved song called "Accidents Happen." Another describes losing progress in Explore mode simply because a path wasn't manually set through the map menu before moving, on an open map with no other engines running, ending the session for a mistake that shouldn't have been possible to make in a genuinely free-roam mode. The frustration isn't that the game is realistic; it's that the realism is applied selectively, hard failure states without the deeper simulation systems, manual whistle control, analogue brake and reverser control, water and coal management, that would make the realism feel earned rather than arbitrary.

That selective realism shows up elsewhere too. Cutscenes can't be skipped, which turns a failed story mission into a repeated slog through dialogue already watched once. There's no way to save mid-session, so a bad signal call late in a long timetable run can cost the better part of an hour. Camera controls are frequently singled out as confusing, especially on keyboard, with one reviewer noting the free-roam camera view is buried behind an unlabelled key that most players only discover through a third-party YouTube tutorial the developer itself links to, rather than an in-game explanation. A near-total absence of background music outside the main menu is one of the most repeated complaints in the entire review base, several reviewers say they resorted to playing the show's own soundtrack alongside the game because the silence during driving and dialogue felt hollow.

A Thin Roster, Padded by Day-One DLC

The other consistent sticking point is content, and specifically how that content is split at launch. The base game includes five engines, Thomas, Percy, Gordon, Diesel, and Emily, with James available only through a Deluxe Edition upgrade or a separate paid DLC purchase. Reviewers are near-unanimous in finding this thin for a $40 to $50 base price, particularly because Tidmouth Sheds, the game's own hub location, visibly has seven berths, and story missions reference locations like "Henry's Forest" and "Henry's Tunnel" for characters who simply aren't in the game. The absence of Edward and Henry specifically draws repeated frustration, both are core, numbered members of the original steam team, and their absence alongside a paid James feels, to more than one reviewer, less like a scoping decision and more like a roadmap for future monetisation. Dovetail's own history with Train Sim World, where individual route and locomotive DLC can run into the thousands of dollars over a game's lifetime, gets cited directly by several reviewers as the reason they're wary of recommending the game at full price now, worried that a slow drip of paid engines and branch lines is the plan rather than the exception.

That worry compounds the sense, echoed across many reviews, that the island itself feels underpopulated as a result. With only one instance of each engine running at a time and no ambient traffic, background trains, or pedestrian life beyond scripted moments, large stretches of Sodor outside Knapford station read as quiet and static rather than lived-in, a strange outcome for a franchise whose whole appeal is a bustling, character-filled railway. Bugs compound the emptiness rather than distracting from it: reviewers report characters clipping through cab interiors, points that visually fail to switch on first use, passengers who don't visibly board or leave carriages, and crash physics that either fling trains comically into the air or abruptly cut to black rather than let a derailment play out, undermining a franchise built partly around dramatic, silly accidents.

Verdict

Wonders of Sodor is a game built on real love for its source material and undercut by a publisher's familiar habits. The map is a genuine achievement, painstakingly built from Awdry's own vision of the island, the story missions and Mark Moraghan's narration capture a warmth that fans have wanted from a Thomas game for decades, and the format itself, an open, drivable Sodor rather than another cutscene-strung level pack, is a legitimately novel way to represent this license. But an unforgiving signal system with no sandbox option, a launch roster thinned further by day-one DLC, and a long tail of bugs and missing basics, no save points, no skippable cutscenes, almost no music, keep it from delivering on that promise cleanly. Reviewers who grew up on the Railway Series describe getting real joy out of driving Thomas down his branch line even while cataloguing everything wrong with the experience, and that split verdict is the honest one: worth it now for the specific audience willing to look past the rough edges for the nostalgia, worth waiting on for everyone else until Dovetail proves it's fixing the game rather than just expanding it.