What makes TLOU gameplay great is the variety of choices you have going into each encounter and the strategys you can create. Every time you come across a group of enemies you can look around and determine a battle plan. How many supplies do I have? How many enemies can I see? Which types of enemies will I be facing? What is the patrol route of each enemy? Who do I need to engage, and who can I avoid to save supplies?

It is so deep, so balanced, and well tuned everything just works. Every mechanic is so well refined you always feel in complete control.

Then there is the AI. I admit sometimes it can do some absurdly stupid things, but in other instances it can blow your mind. I don't remember a game that they AI actually worked together so well. The teams of uninfected will actually lay down covering fire so they can flank you. They will stream in, from one door and quickly spread out. Due to the major limitation on bullets you can't just go willy-nilly as they stream across the battlefield. They often stay low and move from cover to cover to complicate your ability to keep track of their locations. Many times a fast moving enemy with a weapon will attack from one side while a shotgun wielding foe will pincer from the other. If you don't knock off the melee guy quick the shot-gunner will blast you while you are tied up with him.

Honestly though, this is only a glance at what happens. To truly understand the brilliance of this game, you have to play it start to finish, and let yourself live the experience,

The story, the acting, the graphics, the gameplay.

It also has a few "What the fuck" moments. There are moments where you would expect the controller to rumble, but you get nothing. When running through crowds, you would think when people bump you, you would get some feedback. I had to check to see if I was using my dualshock controller and not my next gen PS3 controller. Might have just been me. Started playing the game late last night before I passed out.

It's a desired departure from the fast-paced gameplay that happens to be in majority of games, meant to be more realistic. The ammunition is limited, really makes you think twice before using any of them, also makes you looking for another ways and methods to process ( Stealth mode / kills, decoy with bottles , bombs to take a group of enemies ).

The melee combat is very well made and animated, it is not about button mashing, its about what enemy and when you strike ( God I hate Clickers ), also about how well you are equipped, certain enemies require certain weapons ( shivs for Clickers for example ).

The whole feel of " surviving " is great, creating item, keeping your head down, getting back your arrows from dead enemies ... etc

EDIT: I love sixaxis usage in this game, not so meaningful, but really helps the theme of the game and the sense of caution

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I'm playing it on hard mode by the way. Everything probably is less demanding in other modes, I really recomend the hard mode. Not really that hard when you know what you're doing.

The gameplay looks very simple and dumbed down to me. I don't see any difference to Uncharted which to me played like an interactive movie (to me most modern HD games are essentially interactive movies). The only difference seems to be the pacing, if Uncharted was designed to be 30-70 stealth versus gunfight, in The Last of Us that ratio is a bit more adjustable according to your style.

I sneak up to an enemy and then I'm given a visible prompt to hit triangle or square to trigger a fancy takedown animation. Where's the fun in that?

Also what I hate is that the characters are giving clues all the time by talking, so where's the challenge in traversing the environment and figuring out puzzles?

People including journalists seem to be totally engulfed by hype, I feel like an honest opinion and review is hard to find about this game.

Have you played it though?

I disabled any prompts and played without it :P. I also disabled hints and such ^^.

The best parts isnt doing the stealth really, its when all hell breaks loose. The feeling you have during that is unrivaled seriously. For gods sake get the game now man :(

EDIT:
Want to add => You REALLY have to play it to -feel- whats so great. You're like seriously scared somewhat. Especially if you play on Hard/Survival.

Story, game play, the characters, the entire world pulls you in and shows the struggle that man kind now faces. The game really is art you can just stand in the middle of an abandoned town square with the setting sun turning the sky orange and you can hear the wind blowing through the trees and birds in the background it all really shows you how mother nature has reclaimed the everything and makes you feel very small in comparison to what has happened. Amazing.

Very good points brought up by KBG29, I'll also post on behalf of Bananaking, as I think he also nailed it:
"the gameplay was out of this world, it had so many options and every one was extremely polished, shooting enemies WAS not easy, and enemies react to you quite brilliantly. some of these details really helped as well. if i was in a gun shoting and me and an enemy were under cover, if one of my pistols were empty while the other had bullets i would wait until he is under cover, aim and shoot with the empty one, he would hear the sound of it shooting blanks and get out of cover, once he gets away a bit from cover i would either aim with my shotgun or another gun and blast the shit out of him. these details are awesome, also during fights AI really DO help, ellie saved me a lot actually. the melee was just fantastic, the way they reacted to every hit and how the animations are extremely well done, every hit had a perfect reaction, this level of detail in melee combat is unbelievable and unseen before. the way that the envirmont is used during melee is also amazing, basically you could slam anyone to a wall or anything you are next to while combat. for people who say mario or halo has great gameplay and this doesnt, please explain why. this game is just on another league IMO"

And that's only combat mechanics. Keep in mind, that there are also great survival elements, stealth gameplay, story, character development, character interactions, atmosphere that adds to the tension (not really horror imo), amazing audio design, and soundtrack, and of course impressive technical side of the game (Digital Foundry article comes in handy here). I'll try to elaborate on all of those when I have some more time, cause it would make pretty much a whole review. If you ask me, easily the best game I have played this generation in comparable genres, a maybe my favourite this generation, this game or Uncharted 3.

Also I don't know about you, but when it comes to "core" games, especially those heavily story oriented, I like to play them in specific environment, to get the full experience. I don't play less than an hour in one sitting, in a dark room, with headphones on, so that none external means disturb me, and I can get fully immersed into the world of the game. Playing half on hour, in the store stand, is like a total opposite of this, with brightly lit room, with a lot of people, a lot of different sources of sounds, for me that wouldn't even be a half-assed experience.

This I think sums up the problem with modern game design. That's the design philosphy of most "dumbed down" games and Naughty Dogs are masters of it, that they always want the player to feel in control.

They design each encounter so the player tends to naturally make the best choice, or they design an encounter so that you can approach it in many  different ways and they all work. The player feels good about himself, seldom frustrated.

To me this is deception and I always get a very artificial feeling when playing this kind of game.

Instead, classical masterpiece games like Half-Life 2, Thief, Deus Ex and Dark Souls didn't make the player always feel in complete control. You often made the wrong choice, you felt frustrated, it was challenging. And that's what made them great.

Like the demos they've showed for say the latest Hitman or Splinter Cell games. They show how you can approach each mission in three different ways - pure stealth, lethal stealth or guns blazing - and we're supposed to be sooooo impressed. But if the level is very consciously and cynically designed with all of this in mind, that the player will always feel in complete control, then the end result will feel artifical and not satisfactory.

No I haven't. I am tempted though because of all the praise and because my scepticism towards that praise.

I want to be proven wrong.

Exactly how much of the prompts and hints can be disabled? I love such a feature.

It is really disturbing to me how our angles of vision can be very similiar on games like Dark Souls and Dragon's Dogma, and how they can be a complete reversal on games like Skyrim, Oblivion and The Last of Us :/