I'm at a point in Rise of the Ronin where I probably have done too much of the sandbox stuff. It's honestly super good as a sandbox game and has some of the best combat you're going to see in a sandbox. The side shit is all good. But right now I'm looking at 20+ hours in the first act clearing all the content, and there are maybe four enemy types, and at the end of the day all I do is parry and a normal combo. In the archetype's it's trying for, it is top notch. A lot of fun, a sterling example of the genre but the weaknesses of the genre are still there despite it stumbling into none of the slop an ubisoft sandbox will force you to do. Every mission has you do the game's core competency: You go somewhere and stab a bunch of people and then fight a boss. No tailing, no lame stealth, only a few brief transit conversations before you stab people. Everything bad about a GTA or an Ass Creed game is not here, period, and if you like the period, it's great.
But it's optimized like shit on PC and at the end of the day less of a value for your time versus gameplay than spending the same amount of time doing one of the Nioh games
