There's both an inherent limitation yet simultaneously an advantage to a binary "yes/no" recommendation system over a score system. On one hand, it can feel somewhat unfair to not recommend something that's still kind of good, on the other hand, it's more informative for the sake of aiding the decision making of others.
Wo Long is likely to be the best game that I would still give a "not recommended" rating to. Not to serve as active discouragement, just not to overpromise for it.
First off, it really has all the signs of a game that basically shouldn't exist. Clearly conceptualized on some board meeting, where after Koei Tecmo heard of Sekiro's success, they decided to dust off another one of their "mythologized historical asian setting", this time their classic Romance of the Three Kingdoms inspired Ancient China, and told Team Ninja to make "something very parry heavy like Sekiro because it was popular".
Honestly, the result of it is not bad, mostly because Team Ninja remain extremely competent developers - if maybe viewed by some as comparatively low budget - so after the updates past the trashy initial PC release, it actually feels quite good to play, even having some mechanics I really enjoy - such as the Magic system being tied to your Stamina-like resource, which in of itself is gained via combat on all successful moves, including timed parries and landing attacks, making it more of a "combat momentum" style gauge, the spells being very quick to use and powerful, essentially limitless, giving it a very satisfying feel for the base combat with quite a lot of options and skill ceiling, as you are given the varied offensive options to play around with freely.
So what's the downsides? Well, it comes down to two core issues, they themselves being somewhat tied to one another:
1. "One buton fits all" defensive system:
The game's parry-sloppiness comes down to having an omnipotent "dodge" buton which serves as a parry/deflect for melee attack, a dodge proper which also triggers special scripted "parry" animations like the in-place deflection does, working for everything including giant waves of fire and other hazards which don't look like something you should be able to just casually spin through. See, Sekiro had the right idea of forcing you to change up from only "spamming block at the right time" by introducing attacks which need to be jumped over (making good use of it having added a jump button) and dodged position-wise (as the game had very few i-frames to rely on so for the fully unblockable attacks just getting out of the way was the only real choice). Wo Long evidently never considered the importance of that switch-up, which means that the defensive options in fights get boring because the dodge/deflect/parry button timed right is the solution for everything. The game has a jump button which you use for exploration but you'll never feel justified to use in combat because it'll just strictly be a worse option than doing the dodge/deflect, as that one is easier on your muscle memory to spam for defensive actions and successfully using it GIVES you stamina to further your offense or gives you leeway for blocking later.
2. Difficulty balancing:
This is directly tied to issue 1., namely because the aforementioned design deprioritizes everything except sheer timing in terms of planning defensive options, and many fights reflect that by having enemies who fly around and home in onto you during their charge attacks or outright shooting homing projectiles at you (many of which are special unblockable attacks which you can time-deflect back at the enemies with the all-purpose button). This means that the difficulty in terms of defensive options is always limited to how troublesome a given enemy's attacks are to read and time parries against, as well as the damage each of those individual attacks deal, since there's effectively no "alternate strategy" you can conceptualize within these limitations.
Add to it, that, for some inexplicable reason, there are a few bosses with essentially instant-kill attacks, so when those are paired with bad/complicated timings, it makes those few encounters by far the most difficult in the game, while the others inbetween tend to be surprisingly and disappointingly easy, instead. So for most of the game the difficulty is either yawn-inducing or rage-inducing, with little space to find a golden in-between. Most people's favourite boss is Lu Bu somewhere near the middle of the main game, and I reckon it is mostly because he's relatively difficult but without ways that are infuriating - he has plenty of attacks, a ton of HP to get through and most of his attacks real a relative good bit of damage so he drains your resources fairly quickly, but as the fight is not outrageously long, none of the individual attacks are excessively difficult, he provides a rare circumstance where a player's flex of offensive options gets a chance to shine as well, and as I mentioned earlier, the offensive options in the game actually do feel really good. But aside of that I can think of at least 3 bosses feeling very unfair, 2 of them also being very long fights in the DLCs that really drained my patience.
Incidentally, this is about the bosses, which many people will consider the "core" aspect of gameplay that everyone looks forward to in action games of this style. For fighting normal enemies, the systems of this game actually fare much better, as those tend to deal high damage on average but also go down relatively quickly, making the encounters against regular enemies highly dynamic in feeling, where it's high-stakes but quickly over, as opposed to the boredom or frustration that the aforementioned bosses cause.
Overall, due to the frustrating difficulty which usually feels too easy only to suddenly emerge with big difficulty spikes, I wouldn't recommend it. I won't even get to the "morale" system as a pseudo-progression system which works within each map indepedently of your actual stats which was a complete garbage idea which is a ham-fisted way of "promoting exploration" because if the rest of the systems were good, I could forgive it because there is some valid creative idea behind it, even if the implementation is... pretty dreadful. Ultimately, I wouldn't actively discourage trying this game out, it feels very good to play in terms of basic controls, but it's just not put together well enough by the end of the day to be worthy of being a real contender with the really good action RPGs - especially other Team Ninja titles - so it's only really worth getting into if you already played all the great action games before trying out all the "not quite great" games like this one.
