There was a time when games meant for a very young audience were synonymous with poor quality, as all companies used to do was secure a license, add half a dozen “educational” bits and pieces to their title, and just shove it out there – the audience is so young, they won’t even bother about how crappy the game is. Nowadays, with kids basically being born with a smartphone in their hands, you don’t have this excuse. Kids know better, and expect better. Even the Peppa Pig released a few years ago ended up being half-decent, as its developers knew they weren’t able to get away with a rushed job in such a tech-oriented world. I assumed that would be the same for Thomas & Friends: Wonders of Sodor, but boy, was I disappointed. And irritated.

Choo-choo… until your mission fails after a few yards.

Making a game based on Thomas the Tank Engine sounded like the easiest deal in the world, especially when developed by the people behind the Train Sim World series. All they needed to do was adapt the engine to a more kid-friendly approach, making it less simulator-y, more colorful, less punitive, but still polished enough to look like something worth a parent’s hard-earned cash.

This wasn’t the case. Thomas & Friends: Wonders of Sodor is a surefire disaster, a game that managed to tick off all the wrong boxes in a test. Instead of being a kid-friendly game, it is the same simulator-heavy, and overly punitive Train Sim World, but clunkier, buggier, and with possibly the worst tutorial mode in the history of gaming. Despite featuring original voice acting from the show’s narrator, the overly long (as in, nearly twenty minute long) tutorial is completely unskippable, yet it barely teaches you the necessary rules and mechanics for you to actually become a train conductor in this bizarre, dystopian parallel take on the British Isles. And when it actually teaches you something, it forgets to tell you about fail triggers, or said trigger happens because of a bug.

This is scarier than any Thomas mod shoved into Resident Evil.

If you fail a mission (and you will), you have to redo it all over again, from the very beginning. If that was during the tutorial, you have to restart everything, including the unskippable dialogue sections. You will have to go through learning how to open a door, how to change your camera (and then have the zoom feature locked in due to an irritating bug), and so on. Basically having to deal with the poor presentation, infuriating controls, poor responsiveness (the framerate is shockingly bad), all of that jazz from the very beginning. If I’m ranting about how frustrating this is as an adult, can you imagine a kid enjoying this? In this economy?

Well then, an entire game isn’t limited to a bad start, so I went out to do missions afterwards, only to be greeted to glitches, poor framerate instances, a terribly explained UI… you can probably endure this bureaucracy if you’re accustomed to a more complex simulator, and if you’re REALLY in to trains (I mean, to a passionate degree), but for the target audience, this just won’t work at all. The fact that the game is adamant in using a single control system, and not allowing you to have different approaches to something more akin to, say, Densha de Go, is also baffling. Wonders of Sodor is shockingly devoid of accessibility options.

At the same time, I don’t think Thomas & Friends: Wonders of Sodor is polished or interesting enough for serious fans of train simulators to even care about it. There’s an actual Thomas the Tank Engine-themed DLC package for Train Sim World, and I’m sure anyone from an older age interested in it would have already purchased that expansion for their more realistic train simulator experience. Wonders of Sodor is too rushed and poorly made for anyone over the age of, say, seven, to be patient enough to endure it.

If this picture looks like a realistic game with a random Thomas mod asset thrown into it… yeah you’re not the only who felt that.

I struggle to understand who is Thomas & Friends: Wonders of Sodor for. Kids won’t have the patience to learn about a complex training simulator, and will ragequit almost immediately once they face unskippable cutscenes, poorly explained mechanics, and a plethora of mission-breaking bugs. Older fans of modern train simulators already have access to the vastly more polished Train Sim World series to begin with. I tried to see this game as something aimed at a more specific demographic, but this is just too clunky and too poorly-made. I had a miserable time with Wonders of Sodor, and doubt I’ll be the only one sharing this opinion.

Thomas & Friends: Wonders of Sodor is available now on PS4, PS5, Xbox Series S/X and PC.

Reviewed on Xbox Series S.

A copy of Thomas & Friends: Wonders of Sodor was provided by the publisher.