While the gameplay is serviceable, I've found The Last of Us to be too repetitive and a little bit too long for its own good. Specially the "grab a plank", "find a wood pallet" repeating every now and then. And while melee combat felt good, I wasn't the biggest fan of shooting overall, which kind of made combat feel more like a chore than something I was supposed to enjoy as the game progressed. By the last forth of the game I changed the difficulty to Easy and just ran to avoid combat as much as I could. I never felt there was any incentive to use stealth instead of engaging in combat which was kind of a turn off for me. Broken AI in some points, or things like throwing a Molotov in a group of clickers and only one getting damage from it, also didn't help.
I like the characters, or better put, I like Ellie and Tess, and that was enough for me to play the game until the end and I have no regrets. But it is not a game I'd be looking forward to replay. Definitely, in my opinion, Story and characters are the biggest things going for TLoU. Gameplay overall is an improvement over Uncharted series, but a few bugs here and there, inconsistent AI and being too repetitive, in my opinion, detract from what could have been a much more enjoyable and entertaining experience. It's still a good game, and deserves to be played or experienced in some form. Mainly because Naughty Dog is miles ahead of everyone else when it comes to narrative in video games.