As you will have seen, Dovetail Games sent across a copy of Train Sim World 6 for RailAdvent to play around with prior to early access and full review.

Now that we have had time to play around with the game and for some patches have been released. What do we think about the latest version of the game?

We were lucky enough to receive a copy of the Special Edition, which sets you back £104.99. However, with this pack, you get a rather large number of add-ons!

The Special edition comes with the base game, Riviera Line (Exeter – Plymouth / Paignton), Morristown Line (New York & Hoboken – Dover), as well as Bahnstrecke Leipzig – Dresden.

Not only this, you also get the CrossCountry Voyager, NJ Transit ALP-45DP, DB BR 294, MBTA Commuter Route, Ludwigsbahn Mannheim – Kaiserslautern Route, Cardiff City Network, Semmeringbahn: Wiener Neustadt – Mürzzuschlag and Spoorlijn Zwolle – Groningen.

For a newcomer, this would all cost £250+ to purchase, but it is all included in the one price.

The Deluxe Edition costs £64.99 and comes with the new routes as well as the CrossCountry Voyager, ALP45DP and DB BR 294.

The Standard Edition then comes with just the three new routes for £44.99; however, when you factor in the cost of new routes, which cost around £30 each, this still provides good value for money.

Free roam continues to be a fan favourite as well as the new additions like the in-game unexpected train faults.

As ever, starting up the game lets you transfer your previous DLCs across as well as your game profile, allowing you to jump straight in with your new routes and favourite locos!

Optimisation and Detail

Coming from the days of Train Simulator Classic and Rail Simulator, the graphics on Train Sim World continue to improve, with better trackside detail and reflections.

Being UK-based, we have been really enjoying playing with the Voyagers, HSTs and 150s on the Riviera Line, which is stunning to drive and has the right balance of speed as well as stopping patterns.

We are basing this full review on having played Train Sim World 6 on two machines.

The first features an AMD Ryzen 9 Processor and an AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics card. This machine has been playing the game at Ultra Settings at 55-60fps. The other machine is also an AMD-based machine, the ROG Ally. The ROG Ally plays the game at medium settings at around 40-50fps.

I think Dovetail has done a good job this time round optimising the game for a large variety of systems, with even the game looking great on the medium settings.

Of course, when it comes to a new game, the first play-through is always less fluid as the computer grows its new cache for the route, but with each play-through, the game gets better.

We did see at launch that some users on social media saw “strobing” effects on some machines. However, we didn’t see any of these issues, and it does look to have been fixed with a patch at launch.

General Gameplay

The new big feature for Train Sim World 6 is random events and faults, as well as announcements. Now, as we have said, we are most familiar with the Riviera Line, having driven it in Train Sim Classic as well as with the new game, so the review will mainly showcase this.

However, we have played with the other routes and can fully appreciate the time and effort put into them. They are highly detailed, and play just as smoothly as Riviera Line. It is simply that we do not have any local knowledge of the routes to know just how good they are!

For us, the Riviera Line has a near-perfect balance for a route, with express trains as well as stopping passenger trains with the use of Class 150 trains.

The new features, like the random events and train faults, are really good to see. It adds another aspect to the game to look out for and deal with. It’s good to see that the game comes with a slider so that players can turn up or down the frequency of these addons.

We are very much looking forward to seeing these new aspects of the game be expanded into other routes as time progresses.

Any Bad Points?

Simply put – no! We had a few issues when we had pre-release software but other than these (which were fixed prior to release), we have seen no bugs. It runs smoothly, is highly detailed and very enjoyable to play. With more routes and locos set to be released, it really is an enjoyable time to pick this game up.

There are a few things that could be improved, such as the sea at Dawlish, which could be a bit more detailed, with waves crashing over the sea wall on some of the stormy weather drives.

Final Thoughts

To bring this review to a close, what do we actually think of the new game?

The new routes, random events and train faults are another great upgrade for the Train Sim World franchise. There is something for everyone in the game, and the new Riviera Line route is another top route to play.

Bearing in mind that routes sell for around £30, we think the special edition provides a lot of content for the money.

If you are a newcomer to the game, then the Special Edition is a good value for money. If you are an existing player, the Deluxe Edition is probably the sweet spot for you.

Want to see the route in action? Make sure to follow the RailAdvent Twitch channel to see when I go live-streaming the route: twitch.tv/railadvent

You can purchase a copy of Train Sim World 5 on Steam, Xbox, PlayStation and on the Epic Games Store