This review contains spoilers
As a big fan of Sly and a fan of Infamous, I had high hopes for this game, and it mostly met them. Something surprising to me was how similar this actually felt to Infamous Second Son in general structure (clearing objectives in subzones of the map that you unlock as the story progresses, each with increasing tiers of goons), though it has been years since I played.
First, let's get it out of the way: the game looks incredible. I got a new TV recently and I knew this would be the perfect game to break it in, and it nailed it. The environments are all beautiful, and for the most part the polish is off the charts. (Extremely minor note that really bothered me though: duels have a sweet intro scene, really going for that cinematic feel, but then after Jin pops the sword out of the sheath, it instantly cuts to gameplay where you're both in fighting stances with weapons drawn. A transition scene here to smooth this out, like what FF7R does each time a scene goes back into player control, would have gone a really long way.)
The open world activities are mostly fun, but they get pretty dry pretty quickly. By mid-2nd act I was already skipping a lot of the lower reward or higher commitment ones (fox dens and shrines with charm rewards that didn't fit my playstyle), instead just picking them up for fast travel points when I saw them. Exploring was usually pretty chill, it never felt empty and enemies didn't bother you too much if you weren't looking for a fight. But verticality was a bit of an issue. Having to find the climb point for a mountain or ledge in front of you was not always quite as obvious as it felt like it should be, especially going down. Every time I was someplace high up and wanted to go off in some direction, I found myself really wishing I had a BotW-style paraglider.
The story was overall solid, but it wasn't my favorite ever. (Spoiler Section) Jin is a pretty good character but not one that will stick with me super hard. Most of the ally characters were very low impact for me, even after overstaying their welcome in side tales. I liked Kenji though, even if (or because?) he felt slightly out of place for the atmosphere of the game. Ryuzo was also maybe on the better side, but didn't feel like he got enough establishment in act 1 as an ally and Jin's best friend since childhood, which would have helped his impact later on. Shimura I found was too obviously dislikeable, and Jin's faith in him was just kind of grating until the extremely obvious split between them happened. I think this lessened the impact of the ending a fair bit for me. The Khan was also not much of a villain, despite their attempts in the first act to build him up. I think the story clearly peaked around the middle-end of act 2 as everything comes to a head (starting with Yarikawa), plus the unique section at the start of 3 (losing my horse Kage was legitimately the most emotional experience of the game for me). After that it lost me a little though. Act 3 felt almost rushed, which I didn't mind since I really was not a fan of exploring the snow biome of Kamiagata, and the story closed out with not much fanfare. The duel with the Khan was solid but the big finale taking 20 minutes felt a little limp after the end of act 2. And the same was true of the final duel, not helped by Shimura's character. The overreliance on the poison plot point also felt strange to me.
Combat in general was solid. Usually satisfying and didn't drag out too much, though a couple of the Brutes were fairly annoying. You get plenty of tools to mess with, though you may have too many resources honestly. It was fun when I ran out and would have to improvise with the tools I used more infrequently. I surprisingly liked how swingy combat felt, like it could go in the enemy's favor pretty quickly, but you could also recover to full health and some resolve with a few good parries (though I was on Normal and would have definitely disliked this on the highest difficulty). Being able to get back to a "perfect" state easily was nice in general, that being full health, some resolve, and full resources (as opposed to an RPG with a healing fountain or something).
And finally, Iki island (DLC discussion ahead). I think I enjoyed this more than the main game overall. The story was nice for DLC and fleshed out something that in hindsight seems like a pretty big deal to Jin's story, but got brushed over in the main game. I liked Tenzo more than most of the base game characters as well, I think only having 1 main ally in the spotlight helped a lot. The new open world activities helped spice it up a little after seeing the same ones so many times on Tsushima, and there was a lot more variety than expected (both since it could sprinkle in main game activities here and there, but also in the new things to do, which also felt blended into the world more naturally than those on Tsushima). Due the the smaller zone, they never overstayed their welcome, even after I 100%ed all of Iki, which I just do not want to do for Tsushima. I think the big win of Iki is its smaller scope. It makes everything in the game feel more approachable, and nothing was ever that far from anything else while still not feeling claustrophobic or theme parky. There was plenty of open room just to ride around as needed, but no objective or undiscovered location was ever more than a few hundred yards away. Iki also has really nice environments consistently throughout, which I personally enjoyed more than Tsushima, mostly due to Kamiagata and some smaller areas like spooky forests or swamps. Nearly 1/3 of my total playtime was post-main game just full completing Iki, which I think says a lot since I was ready to just blast it and be done after finishing the main game.
Overall, a very nice modern open world game with great visuals. While ambitious in some ways, it almost felt like it played it safe in overall structure and activities vs being more experimental. Which is not a bad thing, since what was here was so polished. It's sort of how I felt about Super Mario Odyssey vs Breath of the Wild: Odyssey is a very fun, polished version of "3D Mario" with a ton of stuff to do, while BotW tries a lot more new ground for the series and does falter here and there, but overall is wildly successful: the risk paid off. Both are games I gave 5 stars to, though. Ghost of Tsushima is the Odyssey in this comparison, while BotW would be something like, I don't know, Fire Emblem Three Houses. They're both a slight step down from Odyssey and BotW to me (4 stars), with one being a polished safe game and the other being a mostly successful shift with a couple flubs.
First, let's get it out of the way: the game looks incredible. I got a new TV recently and I knew this would be the perfect game to break it in, and it nailed it. The environments are all beautiful, and for the most part the polish is off the charts. (Extremely minor note that really bothered me though: duels have a sweet intro scene, really going for that cinematic feel, but then after Jin pops the sword out of the sheath, it instantly cuts to gameplay where you're both in fighting stances with weapons drawn. A transition scene here to smooth this out, like what FF7R does each time a scene goes back into player control, would have gone a really long way.)
The open world activities are mostly fun, but they get pretty dry pretty quickly. By mid-2nd act I was already skipping a lot of the lower reward or higher commitment ones (fox dens and shrines with charm rewards that didn't fit my playstyle), instead just picking them up for fast travel points when I saw them. Exploring was usually pretty chill, it never felt empty and enemies didn't bother you too much if you weren't looking for a fight. But verticality was a bit of an issue. Having to find the climb point for a mountain or ledge in front of you was not always quite as obvious as it felt like it should be, especially going down. Every time I was someplace high up and wanted to go off in some direction, I found myself really wishing I had a BotW-style paraglider.
The story was overall solid, but it wasn't my favorite ever. (Spoiler Section) Jin is a pretty good character but not one that will stick with me super hard. Most of the ally characters were very low impact for me, even after overstaying their welcome in side tales. I liked Kenji though, even if (or because?) he felt slightly out of place for the atmosphere of the game. Ryuzo was also maybe on the better side, but didn't feel like he got enough establishment in act 1 as an ally and Jin's best friend since childhood, which would have helped his impact later on. Shimura I found was too obviously dislikeable, and Jin's faith in him was just kind of grating until the extremely obvious split between them happened. I think this lessened the impact of the ending a fair bit for me. The Khan was also not much of a villain, despite their attempts in the first act to build him up. I think the story clearly peaked around the middle-end of act 2 as everything comes to a head (starting with Yarikawa), plus the unique section at the start of 3 (losing my horse Kage was legitimately the most emotional experience of the game for me). After that it lost me a little though. Act 3 felt almost rushed, which I didn't mind since I really was not a fan of exploring the snow biome of Kamiagata, and the story closed out with not much fanfare. The duel with the Khan was solid but the big finale taking 20 minutes felt a little limp after the end of act 2. And the same was true of the final duel, not helped by Shimura's character. The overreliance on the poison plot point also felt strange to me.
Combat in general was solid. Usually satisfying and didn't drag out too much, though a couple of the Brutes were fairly annoying. You get plenty of tools to mess with, though you may have too many resources honestly. It was fun when I ran out and would have to improvise with the tools I used more infrequently. I surprisingly liked how swingy combat felt, like it could go in the enemy's favor pretty quickly, but you could also recover to full health and some resolve with a few good parries (though I was on Normal and would have definitely disliked this on the highest difficulty). Being able to get back to a "perfect" state easily was nice in general, that being full health, some resolve, and full resources (as opposed to an RPG with a healing fountain or something).
And finally, Iki island (DLC discussion ahead). I think I enjoyed this more than the main game overall. The story was nice for DLC and fleshed out something that in hindsight seems like a pretty big deal to Jin's story, but got brushed over in the main game. I liked Tenzo more than most of the base game characters as well, I think only having 1 main ally in the spotlight helped a lot. The new open world activities helped spice it up a little after seeing the same ones so many times on Tsushima, and there was a lot more variety than expected (both since it could sprinkle in main game activities here and there, but also in the new things to do, which also felt blended into the world more naturally than those on Tsushima). Due the the smaller zone, they never overstayed their welcome, even after I 100%ed all of Iki, which I just do not want to do for Tsushima. I think the big win of Iki is its smaller scope. It makes everything in the game feel more approachable, and nothing was ever that far from anything else while still not feeling claustrophobic or theme parky. There was plenty of open room just to ride around as needed, but no objective or undiscovered location was ever more than a few hundred yards away. Iki also has really nice environments consistently throughout, which I personally enjoyed more than Tsushima, mostly due to Kamiagata and some smaller areas like spooky forests or swamps. Nearly 1/3 of my total playtime was post-main game just full completing Iki, which I think says a lot since I was ready to just blast it and be done after finishing the main game.
Overall, a very nice modern open world game with great visuals. While ambitious in some ways, it almost felt like it played it safe in overall structure and activities vs being more experimental. Which is not a bad thing, since what was here was so polished. It's sort of how I felt about Super Mario Odyssey vs Breath of the Wild: Odyssey is a very fun, polished version of "3D Mario" with a ton of stuff to do, while BotW tries a lot more new ground for the series and does falter here and there, but overall is wildly successful: the risk paid off. Both are games I gave 5 stars to, though. Ghost of Tsushima is the Odyssey in this comparison, while BotW would be something like, I don't know, Fire Emblem Three Houses. They're both a slight step down from Odyssey and BotW to me (4 stars), with one being a polished safe game and the other being a mostly successful shift with a couple flubs.