The gameplay was fine for what it was doing, with the sole exception of Ellie running around like a spastic idiot all the time breaking imersion. I found the stealthing pretty descent and a good fit for the tone of the story. But it really is a straight line to the end game with gameplay to tie it together, for certain. The latest God of War is a better game in the same vein as this, but it also is more combat centric and was less grounded in the real world, obviously.
I mean, I am not sure what the gripe is about the gameplay really. The enemies (outside of bloaters) were not bullet sponges. The AI was fairly good at representing humans of zombies. The weapons were distinctive enough to have different uses and were not super over the top video gamey. As cover shooters go it was decently executed, when you had to fight. No real difficulty spikes of absurd levels. Again GoW did the ally thing much better, but it came later and had a lot more flexibility in what could occur in combat. It was not the best gameplay of its kind, but it was hardly terrible.
And of course the story, even after Suckmann fagged up parts of it, was top notch. I really think Troy Baker and the Ellie voice actress's input had more to do with that than anything else. It showed with the dropoff in quality and relatability in the DLC compared to the main game. Baker was basically uninvolved in the DLC and they were trying to push the idea of a wakandan carpet muncher being a love interest for a 12 year old girl in the zombie apocalypse. But the gameplay in the DLC was actually improved, with more options on how to take care of areas and some neat threeway fights. I think in retrospect, even though there are similarities, the story from this game is better than GoW, but only just. And thats because the transition of the Joel/Ellie relationship was much smoother than the somewhat jarring Kratos/Atreus one, so really nitpicking.