Recent reviews by NWOrnislow

Definitly one of the best City Planning/Building games I have played since Sims City 2000. While the DLCs are slightly overpriced in my opinion, the Quality of all, Collosal Order is putting out is definitly average or above. Even more than 3 years they - and also I - keep coming back to this game.

Skyrim had been my first Steam game and it is just the best game on Steam out there. With never ending quests one of the biggest open worlds at its time a highly active modding community and soon even an ultra HD update this game has proven it's timeless strength standing over Diablo and the witcher 3 in my personal rating list of RPGs. There is pretty much everything said about skyrim so I just say what is most important:
Go out and play this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ epic title!

Shadow of Mordor is an extremly strong title in the beginning (about 1 up to 2 hours main story). However it suffers the most at its deepest mechanics and principles.
Before we get to this point a quick overview:
The world is the area around the black gate, which in the Lord of the Rings universe marks the border between the Land of Mordor and Gondor. You begin at a time, when the black gate is the very eastern outpost of gondor. However it gets overrun by orcs and now it is your task to free the gondorian side of the border.
With relatively deep characters and amazingly creative mechanics, this game gets pretty close to the tales of Tolkien and its very good movie adaptation.
Seen this way the game is among the best games of the decade so far. Sadly a dark shadow of failiure covers this elsewise epic title:
The game suffers at it's two cores: action fights and stealth gameplay. While the fights are probably intended to be very hard, the stealth is not. One mechanic of shadows of mordor is responsible for the near imposibillity of this game: orcs can smell you from quite a distance. You often cannot sneak past an orc or silently approach it without being mentioned and thereby risking an alert of all orcs in a 100 up to 200 meter radius. This relatively realistic mechanic destroys the whole experience of the game and makes it unforgivingly hard. In addition to that some fights are automatically triggered and not avoidable. As a consequence you often get stuck with an unforgiving and brutally hard fight.
Sadly also this Lord of the Rings game failed (at least in my eyes) letting us waiting for a probably impossible epic RPG set in middleearth.

Although I did not really like the older thief games (mainly because of the controls) I am a fan of this one.
This sentence already says much about the thief reboot. It cannot be seen as a sequel or prequel, because it is by no means like the older thief games. Those who played the older games may notice a few characters, who already appeared in older games, but after all it is a new game with little up to no connections to the outstanding older works.
So the question is, is it able to reach or even beat the older games?
Well apart from obvious points as better graphics and better controls it is simply different. New 'interactive' controls (button mashing, quick time events) got introduced, an optional minimap and a slowly discovered map replace the tactical maps at the beginning of each mission, but most important close combat with sword got removed and made the game a whole lot more demanding and less forgiving, when it comes down to stealth mistakes.
The AI is more or less good and the story is quite interesting.
The first person view was one of the best ones I ever got to enjoy and even beats many Bethesda games in terms of feeling realistic.
Summary:
For quite a good price you get a brilliant game with thief (4). It's immerse and when played with a controller it feels as interactive as possible with current controllers.
I can only recommend this often underestimated first person stealth games to all who love stealth, first person and beeing a thief hiding in shadows.

This newer Entry is the GTA I always waited for. The first GTA I played was IV and at its time it felt quite good and entertaining, but missed fancy graphics or a good open world. For me GTA was always a bit like a cool and realistic Version of The Sims. Where IV met his borders V got its strong parts:
-Hard to control fun activities turned into funny and a bit challenging mini games.
-Little variety of such things as nationalities or the city itself turned into complex milieus and a whole Island featuring everything from a poor suburb to a mountain including a platform with a table of sights.
Summery:
I would wait until GTA V is at least down to 30€ or so and then buy this marble of open world life simulation. It may be worth more, but as steam games are getting cheaper every day and there are plenty of sales every year I would, in this case wait until the game is cheaper.

Over the years the classic tomb raider formula slowly had been perfected. The last entry I played before the 2013 reboot was underworld and at this time I also really felt there were no huge improvements in the series possible, without changing the classic formula drastically. However this must have been exactly the thought of Square Enix, as they threw the old formula on a pile of nostalgia (like they did it with thief) and added the new key component of the first half of the 2010's: action. At first I had been quite critical about this new formula, but Tomb Raider (2013) delivered a new nearby perfect tomb raider formula. A good balance between action, survival and story elements gave a new touch to the slowly changing old formula and for all fans of the older tomb raider games (like me) square enix added the 'additional tombs'. Those tombs had been voluntary areas hidden somewhere on the map with a focus on timing and questsolving. So Square Enix managed to keep one of the key components of the old formula, while shaping a new game.
!Minor spoilers on the basic situation of lara in this game!:

It may not have a motorcycle or fancy glasses, but this tomb raider game features a more natural lara on her path to become the hero we used to know and love. In this title Lara is stranded on an island and slowly dicovers her potential both as hero and her father's successor (although she manages once again to be one of the worst archeologists the ruins of the pacific have ever seen).
Summary:
All the fans of the old series I would recommend this game, because if you manage to dig a little bit deeper, this game may hide some nostalgic feelings from you. and some really demanding puzzels (for tomb raider standarts)
All the newcomers I would recommend to see this game as a brilliant action game with a slight focus on story and a few quicktime events (like all the Square Enix titles in the last times).