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Team Ninja's fusion of Nioh & Wo Long's mechanics in the mold of an Assassin's Creed title was way more enjoyable than I expected.

THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM
The ultimate issue this game has is the Performance, and it's the primary reason why it's sitting at Mixed reviews. I have a 3090ti with an I9 11900k, on mostly High/Med settings with DLSS Balanced enabled I played through the entire base game and half of NG+ constantly drowning in 30-45 fps in any town or mid+ sized setpiece. It was absolutely miserable and I wouldn't recommend that experience to anyone.
HOWEVER, The patch they released on March 25th completely fixed the performance for me and my friend. The game now holds a pretty steady 100-120 fps post patch, even in one of the worst-running lategame missions that ran at a nearly constant 30 fps before. If it wasn't for this enormous optimization update this would've been another negative review in the sea of performance complaints. Your mileage may vary, but as far as I can tell, the performance issues have been resolved, which leads into why I think the game is good.
GAMEPLAY IS KING
The main reason to stick around despite the possible performance issues is the gameplay. The combat, which I would best describe as a hybrid of Nioh's stance system and Wo Long's more simplified combo strings & martial skills with an emphasis on deflecting, is incredibly addictive. Stealth is also pretty prevalent as it's an effective mechanic to even the odds and appease your Tenchu nostalgia, if you choose to engage with it, as the game rarely forces you to use stealth.
The actual combat itself is heavily reliant on using parries (called countersparks) to preserve your Ki (stamina) and to open up the enemy for larger punishes on a successful parry chain. You can obviously go on the offensive as well but enemies can have inconsistent hyper-armor windows where they'll just instantly whip into attack chains, so it's usually best to play more defensively. When you get into the zone and have learned certain enemy combos effectively enough to counterspark full 7 hit combos and then smacking them with a combo of your own, it's an injection of pure dopamine, and it's ultimately what will keep you coming back.
There's a SUBSTANTIAL variety of bosses and enemies, all with different weapons and unique movesets to contend with, so you're not stuck falling into the exact same patterns for every fight. The game handles stances similarly to Ghost of Tsushima, with a rock paper scissors system for what each stance type is strong/weak against.
Bosses have heavily varied movesets (both a plus and a negative to me) with more standard strings, unblockables that you have to counterspark or dodge out of (same as Wo Long and Nioh's red attacks), and instant stingers with barely any start-up, and many of these attacks have near identical start-up animations to the point where you basically have to make reads half the time on 33/33/33s and 50/50s. It's both a positive because it adds a lot of complexity and variety to the fights (I could fight a boss 15 times in a row and they would still whip out new moves and strings I forgot they had), but at times it just feels utterly cheap and frustrating.
Once you get to NG+, the enemy health and damage gets massively inflated as you'd expect, but the counter-spark timing is shortened (which was already a tighter window than Wo Long's deflect, mind you) and most annoyingly the enemy stagger window becomes comically short after countersparks. You'll finish daigo parrying an 8 hit string of attacks with all varied timings and your reward will be 2 regular attacks or a single martial skill before the enemy instantly rips a hyper-armored combo or grab in your face and resetting you back to the defensive. It ultimately becomes another facet of remembering the specifics for each fight as the window varies, and while it's not a complete detriment, it can feel really exhausting and unrewarding to spend 6 seconds deflecting to land a pitiful amount of attacks before instantly being thrown into the blender again. This is all compounded by the fact that whiffing a counterspark and/or running out of Ki is usually a catastrophic event and it's very easy to fudge the timing on one or fall into the opposite rhythm of the enemies attacks if you whiff one, leading to you being annihilated instantly.
These gripes aside, the combat is addictive and the quest to style on enemies more and more effectively will keep you playing, which brings me into the next section.
STYLE OF THE RONIN
This game is brimming with style. The whole gallery of different attack animations, martial skills, and finishers that the player, enemies and NPCs/bosses perform is a treat to see. There's a huge variety of flashy and brutal moves and I don't see enough people give praise to how great of a job Team Ninja did in this regard.
Between the 9 primary weapon types, all of which are unique and enjoyable to use, there's a plethora of different styles for each weapon that affect your character's stance, moveset, counterspark type, martial skills, stat bonuses, and what weapon types you'll be advantaged/disadvantaged against. It's a great system and the variety available for most weapons is staggering (some definitely get shafted though with only 1 style of each discipline). You unlock more styles by meeting/fighting NPCs and bosses, and you upgrade them through side missions, dojo fights, and by leveling bonds, which gives you organic incentives to be excited to progress and meet more characters.
The Fashion, is also pretty cool. The game uses a more modular system for your drip and has a great transmog system, much like Nioh and Wo Long, except here you set your transmog appearance in a loadout, including the appearance for your weapons, and it'll stay applied even if you change equipment. This is a godsend for most of the game as you're pretty constantly cycling through loot for a while.
The outfit variety is pretty good, with a healthy mix of both Eastern and Western themed outfits. My only complaint is the selection of actual metal armors is lacking pretty hard, there's barely any good helmets, and there's also only one half mask that barely matches with anything and looks bad.
The Team Ninja standard character creator is here and it's still great, as well as a very solid photo mode. Shame there's no Ansel support though.
THE WORLD
ROTR is a historical fiction game with many NPCs based on real figures (Taking place during the same period as LAD Ishin, which was my only prior experience with this slice of history lol), and has a story that is both very interesting and also kinda convoluted. NPCs are compelling enough and I enjoyed doing all of their bond missions.
The open-world is indeed filled with many Ubisoft style POIs, but the maps are condensed enough and the rewards for doing the side content were valuable enough that I didn't really take too much issue with 100%ing each map. The graphics are fine and a little overhated IMO (at least now that the game actually runs decently).
CONCLUSION
The game was fun enough that I was willing to stick with it despite it running horrendously. Now that it's seemingly fixed, I would definitely recommend it if you're a fan of Team Ninja's other titles, as it offers a fun new experience while still feeling familiar enough, and when you're reaching its highs, it's very gratifying. Also it's quite refreshing for a game to only cost $50 instead of $70.