Honestly, an article for this game is almost redundant with the title -- so redundant that I'm struggling with ways to approach actually writing an article. Existing at a strange point in history where Resident Evil was well established but character action wasn't, Onimusha: Warlords was an early attempt at creating character action using the basic conceits of fixed cameras and tank controls. If you like Ninja Gaiden (especially Ninja Gaiden Black) or Devil May Cry (especially 1 and 3), you might find it interesting to see where a lot of their ideas came from; however, it's unlikely that you'll particularly enjoy playing the game for its own sake.
It's probably easiest to approach this by discussing what later games took from Onimusha: Warlords, because that's a lot. Of course, both Ninja Gaiden Black and Devil May Cry 1 and 3 took the basic structure -- a contiguous semi-linear world with lots of combat against minor enemies, some light key hunting and puzzle solving, and with segments broken up by boss fights. Onimusha: Warlords doesn't explicitly break things up into individual chapters, a distinction that's almost completely pointless in NGB and DMC 1 for anything other than score, but the basic idea is the same. At the micro level, DMC's rather weird dodge comes straight from this game (although it arguably makes more sense here, where it's always left or right on the d-pad rather than whatever the character's left or right are in screen space, thanks to tank controls), as do Stinger and High Times (although the launcher here functionally is more like Aruthur's launcher in Knights of the Round, since you can't juggle and are limited to taking advantage of an okizeme situation). Meanwhile, NGB draws heavily from O:W thematically, but also its powerful blocking is derived from this game (complete with certain attacks guard crushing and grabs beating blocking), as are the behavior of knockdowns and Field Sealer, and essence management, ninpo, weapon leveling, and ultimate techniques are clearly inspired by how magic attacks and soul absorption work with each other in O:W. Ninja Gaiden Sigma fans will be delighted to learn that the "chick ninja chapter" idea finds its origins in O:W; those who, like me, think that NGS was a horrible rendition of a classic will be far less sanguine when they find themselves taking control of Kaede.
So, with the titans of the character action genre taking their cues from this game, how is it bad?
A big part of it is in its treatment of 3D space. It's almost inaccurate to say that Onimusha: Warlords is a 3D game, since at no point does the player traverse the z axis in any way except for climbing stairs. With no ability to jump at all, the action is reduced to being a fairly slow moving 2D action game in every way that actually matters. Combos are mostly limited to basic strings with a Stinger or High Times tacked on at the end, and most of the player's defense consists of holding LB until there's an opening (some bosses can't even hurt a player who just holds down LB forever). But, worse still, is how the lock-on dependent movement options behave; the lock on in this game behaves really strangely, and since this game has tank controls, that means that the direction you move can suddenly surprise you because your facing instantly changed because the lock on decided to go for a different enemy. And there's no way to influence what enemy a magic attack decides to go after, which can be infuriating; a big magic attack you intended for a high HP enemy can just be wasted on a random popcorn enemy with you having no say in this at all.
And then, on top of this, there's some pretty nasty QoL issues. Unskippable cutscenes are a bad time. O:W includes puzzles as a part of its Resident Evil heritage, but it fundamentally misunderstands the role they played in that game, so we get timed self-contained sliding block puzzles unrelated to the rest of the game interrupting the action for no good reason (do yourself a favor and just look up the solutions in a walkthrough). The difficulty curve is almost entirely random, with the second Kaede chapter being far harder than anything that comes after it, and the game's two hardest bosses both coming in the first half, one of them being the very first.
I've expressed amazement before at how influential a game as bad as Devil May Cry 1 managed to be, but its predecessor is almost as influential and almost as bad. If you're really curious about character action history, I guess you could play this... but why not just play NGB instead?
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