TLDR: Play the trial for a good while, If its your cup of tea, that's great, If not maybe you just needed the fix that this provides, Its not a bad game, I would say overall its a Good game but poorly executed.

There's a lot to say about this game, I recommend it to fans of DW, but its a real oddball and i do hope they
somehow tighten what they experimented with here because its got some charm, lets face it, if you are a fan of the warriors games, there isnt much to expect, and its different for a change.

The open world and main basis of the game is kinda cool, its not super fleshed out and has a "abandoned MMO" aesthetic lots of land, Sometimes a nice view, but other than go to the next outpost or the odd side-quest there is little to do, except check boxes to increase the amount of the map you have explored and the odd home environment to change your outfit.

What is nice is the pacing this time, There is no custom character unfortunately, choose your character and there you go, the rest is done on the world map, The pacing of story is interestingly nice, because you can just storm your way across the land to carry on giving story a focus as going to the next cut-scene is rather fun, it feels like you are progressing and you have many stories to complete, yet if you dont want to do that, just get lost somewhere, ideally you would at least knock down the defences of the next battle with this base level system they have going, so if you are on route to somewhere, its more advisable to capture the bases on your route, or not and have tougher enemies, your choice really.

Graphically, Again, not much to expect it has its moments when it rains and you do see the characters get wet or get dirty, so some thought has been put into this i do think the models are good, on PC you can have a jank way to get a stretched ultrawide version, so it fills the screen, performance is kinda dire overall, you have to brute force performance out the game, i dunno why, it launches on the steam deck but no matter the settings it seems to stay at 30FPS, if you simply have a modern PC though, you should be fine most the time.

And for combat, typical warriors game with the 2 button bashing, you have stats from some armour items to mix a few things, and any character can use practically any weapon you choose with a mild upgrade system to buy stuff from the shop, yet i like the fact that you can also activate some skills manually, knock them down, slam them up in the air, so you can make variance in your combat for a change, if someones being a bit of an arse to deal with.

A lot of what DW9 does is new for the series, that is mostly what people dislike, but its still a warriors game, I cant say its bad, I can see where they were going with this and the ideas are there, it doesn't feel unfinished exactly as much of the things are simple to be inline with the game dynamic, but too ambitious at the time sure and definitely needed optimisation, but saying that, the PC version is better than the console version as its more consistent overall, at least if you have a good PC, mileage varies on your specs.

Remember you can just try out the trial, IIRC it caps you at level 20 or a certain part of the story, if you find value just get the complete edition, as i find the content is worth the value at least, ideally you might want it on sale at this point but if you like the flow of the game and you want more, you can just keep playing it.

Or just roam the map until you get bored, the trial tells you enough about what the game is.