I've seen this complaint make the rounds but like most TLoU2 complaints, I don't think it holds up. I am not up to the task of making a full combat system analysis, but I can say that the combat system is pretty flexible in it's approach, dependent on some factors like ammo availability.
First off, your kit allows for quite a bit of flexibility. You have your pistol weapon that serves as your jack of all trades, a power pistol for emergency situations, a rifle for longer ranges, a bow weapon for stealth, a shotgun for close ranges, and finally a secret weapon that is only available end game. Additionally, you have tools. Smoke bomb, molotov, and mine for Ellie and pipe bomb for Abby. And then you also have the different melee abilites, wherein Ellie has a knife and Abby has her muscles as their respective advantage. Assuming all things being equal, your set up allows you to approach any given encounter at minimum 5 different ways - you can stealth your way through, you can pick targets off at a distance, you can set up traps, you can go guns blazing at mid/close range, or you can run past enemies to the door.
Additionally, between the two characters, you have all sorts of nuances that are arguably minor differentiations, but they add up dramatically. Abby's shotgun does not feel like Ellie's shotgun, Ellie's sniper-rifle does not play like Abby's military rifle, I am more comfortable in a melee fight with Abby than I am with Ellie, I am much stealthier as Ellie than I am as Abby. That the game doesn't strictly prohibit any playstyle with either character does not diminish that these girls play very differently, especially once you level up both your weapons and your supplement abilities.
The game tries to have you diversify your approach, so you have to take into account atleast 2 other factors - who you are fighting and where. The factions you have are the WLF's, the Seraphites, and the Infected. Infected obviously play differently from humans in that they are all attack, except for the stalkers, which encourages stealth where infected don't spot you right away, but guns blazing if they do. Meanwhile the WLF and Seraphites will rarely rush you, but play much smarter, will flank you, use tactics and a variety of weapons, including dogs (who both take priority as stealth targets and can scent you out but act as sort of mini-infected in it's attack pattern if it's aware of you, meaning you're fighting an infected-like enemy while also the WLF). Meanwhile, the WLF is pretty cool about vocalizing their tactics when you fight mostly them for half the game, which makes you realize how often you relied on hearing enemies call out their tactics when the Seraphites are able to use whistles to communicate. I think this is something that I would not have even noticed in other games that don't have the enemy shout out their flanks, but because they did, and then they took it away, I got flanked more my seraphites. So, in the general game, you have arguably 2 enemies that mostly act similar, and then one that is very different from either. They overlap to an extent, but the differences are very much felt.
Which brings me to environments, which encourage and in some cases demand different approaches. The suburban environment of Hillcrest on Day 2 encourages a far stealthier playstyle over the urban environment of Seatle's streets you've been walking through in Day 1. The water-drenched Day 3 adds verticality not just by taking place in mutli-story buildings, but also having a network of water ways beneath the floors that let you traverse in ways the AI can't, but sets you on a breathe timer. All of which plays nothing like the Infected sections where environments are designed to be claustrophobic and you have shamblers whose explosive spores block off entire entryways through a map. All this before the game flips the script on Infected behavior when there are stalkers present or walled Clickers are present and then the challenge shifts to you being aware of your surroundings enough not to be caught off guard by them hiding and ambushing you. And all these can mix and match in various combinations, including having infected and WLF in the same room, which offers a huge variable factor because the AIs react unpredictably and open up new possibilities if they are against more than one enemy.
Which leaves the set piece moments...LoU2 has a few of those, like that car ride Ellie and Jessie have at the end of Day 2, but I agree there are fewer of these scripted sequences. Good.
I personally have a distaste for the sequences you describe. They're not bad, but they are shallow in their scriptedness. There's no way that you pushing the car with Ellie and Bill will ever play out differently no matter what you do. You're in a big open area where you are demanded to stay close to the objective point (the car) and infected come at you in specific, scripted intervals. The most choice you have is whether you use your revolver or shotgun to hold them off, since both are objectively the more advantageous choice over the pistol and rifle against infected in this open environment. The sniper rifle incident allows for a tiny bit more flexibility as you push through the houses to get to the sniper nest, but not significantly. And then once you do get to the sniper, you are literally stuck looking through the scope until the game tells you your not. What if you wanted to leave earlier to get a clearer path for Eliie, Henry and Sam? Too bad, game says you need to snipe. Not to mention the absurdism of that particular encounter, but that's more of a narrative gripe admittedly.
I like that Last of Us doesn't force cinematographic action sequences. They simply provide YOU the tools to make your own fun. Like, one of my favorite moments was during Day 3 as Ellie, I had another building full of enemies to take out. It was 10+ enemies, and I'd be coming at them from a hard to see (for me) position and not know where they are or where I could go for safety....but then I noticed to my left that there was a big tram on top of a broken bridge that I could climb. I decided to go explore there first before hte big fight. And what I found was ammo for my sniper rifle, and an open door overlooking the building the enemies were hiding in. It's line of sight was perfect. I laid down and took aim. It is the only place, to my recollection of two playthroughs, that's completely safe as a sniper spot in the game, made specifically for this moment, but you find it on your own. And if you don't, then you tackle that encounter like I had originally planned to do. This was also when the storm was already roiling, so it was dark, it had loud, heavy rain, interspursed with the occasional lightning. When I fired my shot, the AI couldn't spot me because I was too far away, but that was perfect to the scene. I felt like that Sniper from the Enemy Gate movie, where he shot in time with the thunder to mask the sound of his gunshot, so the enemy was utterly confused where the bullets were coming from. It was gloriously cinematic, while being 100% in game.
There are dozens of examples like this. Like, one everyone encounters is those assholes hiding in that one building that attack you when you take a workbench. This isn't some forced sequence. If you're paying attention to the environment, you can figure out that they are there. You can only enter the building one of two ways, both of which involve making noise. But one of them is a noise alarm that can only have been set up by a person. And if you try to open the door they're hiding in, the first time you do it, you hear their voices for a split second. In Last of Us 1, this moment would have just been a mandatory sneak attack that the game sometimes had, but not only can you be an observant player who spots this themselves, you can set up traps so when they come out and try to ambush you, they'll instead meet a happy mine ready to greet them with love and explosions. How is that not better? All this is besides the fact that the game is so polished, so well animated, that even regular gameplay can often end up looking as cinematic as if it had been scripted? From our very own
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So, you have a diverse weapon set with several significant nuances between both characters, who themselves are have different styles of play, who are themselves put in wildly different situations depending on different environments and different enemy lay out. They encourage vastly different playstyles at different beats of the game, but will rarely ever force you into a specific action. You can favor stealth, or aggression, or patience almost to your hearts content. I've even heard of people trying to play the pacifist and avoid/escape all the fights they can, and they got through a good part of the game like that. All this while the game looks so good you can't believe it's unscripted so much of the time. So if you were given all that, and you were 'doing the same thing over and over', is that really the game's fault?