Kenshi is definitely one of my favorite games. It is, on a technical level, rather rough around the edges ; but even considering its post-apocalyptic setting, there is nothing else quite like it.

I will try to keep this review as spoiler free as possible.

Kenshi doesn't play like most games. You can't concisely classify its genre, it is something of a Sandbox Survival-RPG-RTS Adventure game. There is no set narrative for you to play through, no classic quests. Just a large world, filled with factions and wildlife to explore, pillage, exploit and fight in, with some interesting lore and world-building thrown in. You have to make your own fun, and even after 500 hours of playtime, I still haven't done close to all that I could and want to do. I haven't even set up a full fledged base yet or killed all of the end game encounters. And that's not even considering all of the potential mod based content.

I will mostly skip talking about specifics and focus on the broader pros and cons of the game.

The map is absolutely huge and has many differing biomes ; Don't worry, it isn't all desert as far as the eye can see!
There are tons of locations and enemies to loot, as well as good motivations to get that loot.
Many different characters, locations, enemies and wildlife to encounter.
Varied and unique races to play and encounter.

Each character has a ton of different stats that affect combat, traversal and crafting.
Your characters earn their stats by using them and when they get stronger you feel rewarded.

A solid stats based combat system. It can be as hands off, sit back and watch or as micro intensive as you want.
A quite unique injury system, where each limb has it's own health pool and negative effects when they get damaged.

Very fun and completely optional if you are not into that sort of stuff.
Many technologies to research and discover that unlock a bunch of different buildings and functionality for your base.

A simple, low maintenance hunger system. Just enough of a push to got you out there doing stuff.

While on a technical level the visuals are quite dated, the overall aesthetics is very well handled
A decent (great with mods) variety of weapons and armor to chose from (I put this in aesthetics since that is what I choose my gear for).

Similar spreadsheet style modding system to games like Skyrim with a low barrier to entry for both installing mods and making them.
Good support through the FCS to build and upload mods to the Steam Workshop.

If you stick to playing "normally", the game is rather well balanced. Sure, some gear and strategies plain outperform others, but nothing is bad enough to be unusable. The thing I am a bit mixed about is how easy it is to exploit the game if you know what you are doing. It takes some self-control and role-playing excuses to not go ahead and meta-game too hard.

While the effects, ambient sounds and music that are there are very good, there is a distinct... emptiness of sounds in the game. The biggest culprit are the ambient sounds. They always sound good, but while in some areas the loops sound complete, in other areas they lack some depth and layering. There also definitely needs to be a bit more music as the OST is rather sparse. Finally, the technical side is rather weak, as distance based sounds seem to fall off unnaturally and the audio levels are a bit over the place (you can fine tune different parts of the audio though). Sadly more advanced audio modding is not very well supported.

Your mileage may vary - some people get no crashes on potatoes while others get consistent crashing on high end rigs. I personally have a very good computer and experience semi-consistent crashing (keep in mind that I have a lot of mods and that can aggravate the issue). Since there is both an auto-save and quick-save feature, this is not too bad of a problem, but it does somewhat encourage save-scumming. By far this game's biggest con to me.

Overall, Kenshi is a good as you make it to be. You need to put in some effort to get fun out of it, but what you get you can't easily find in any other game.