The Last of Us Part 2 is undeniably beautiful, expansive, ambitious, and epic. I basically hated it, unfortunately.

The gameplay is identical to the original with some minor changes. Each of the two characters you play as has slightly different abilities and a different suite of weapons, but the variety allows you to play either of them basically however you want to. All of the UI and control complexity remains from the first with all of the same negatives. There is a bit more to the melee combat (dodges and counter attacks) but it feels very sluggish and targeting is off a lot of the time. The melee combat basically plays like an extremely bad version of Bloodborne.
On the upside, using shivs to get through doors is no longer a thing!

Narratively, the game is a train wreck. It has a ton of content that is irrelevant to what seems to be the theme of the story, a ton of mixed messaging around how you are meant to feel, and the narrative itself is fairly rote and predictable.
The game begins with an extended introduction where Joel and Ellie's current situation is laid out and Abby kills Joel (I actually don't think this is a bad narrative choice). You then play as Ellie in Seattle over three days up until your revenge quest leads you to a confrontation with Abby. Now it is Abby's turn over those three days until you meet up with Ellie. Then, after a non-resolution, you play through a low-key farm scene, followed by Ellie continuing her pursuit of revenge in Santa Barbara and the finale of the game. This is all punctuated with flashbacks, showing you the history of the various characters in the game as they relate to Abby and Ellie as well as why Abby killed Joel to begin with.
So. I think it is supposed to be a tale of revenge and cycles of violence in a world driven almost entirely by violence culminating in two people paying dearly for that cycle and deciding to end it. This sounds fine, but the execution here is incredibly poorly done.

Most of Abby's section is unrelated to this theme (she already got her revenge and doesn't even know Ellie is around for 75% of her playtime) and seems to exist purely to make you identify with Abby and her friends, presumably in order to feel worse about having killed them all as Ellie (but... I guess I should only feel bad for killing the people who have backstories? not the nameless masses I chew through otherwise? So is the theme that only targeted violence is bad?). Even at points where the stories should obviously affect each other (when Abby is in the basement of the hospital while Ellie is killing Nora upstairs) they just don't.
New factions (The Seraphites) and characters (Lev and Yara) are introduced that don't have anything to do with the theme other than I guess to further motivate that Abby doesn't deserve death?
Abby's story could have been about how her revenge didn't solve her problems or something, dealing with fallout from going rogue or the trauma of what her group did, giving you some insight into Ellie's possible future that would actually add to the game's theme, but it just doesn't and ends up feeling too long, kills the pacing, and is completely vestigial.

There seems to be an attempt to humanize the WLF (Abby's group) and make you feel like Ellie shouldn't just kill them, but they are a group that indiscriminately kills anyone coming into their territory and leaves corpses around as warnings. They also ruthlessly kill any of their own members who show any mercy towards the Seraphites, who they are at war with. The game is written as though the WLF is redeemed by the fact that they have names, joke with each other, and some of them are pregnant. The fact that the game seems to want you to feel bad for killing them as Ellie but also to feel justified killing them as Abby when they turn on her is completely mind boggling.

Flashbacks in media normally serve to re-contextualize something, giving the viewer a different perspective on a character or event. Almost all of the copious flashbacks only seem to show that Ellie and Abby have friends...? I guess? They are universally just flashbacks to time spent with people we already know they care about. They occasionally give you some insight into relationships (Owen and Abby) that is obvious or pointlessly motivate some character trait (Tommy is a sniper!). There is a ton of buildup for a particular flashback (Ellie and Dina's kiss, which they already showed as an E3 teaser anyway!?) that really has nothing to say about any of the characters or events.
Two flashbacks in the game actually serve a purpose related to the story and theme, one that illuminates why Abby wanted to kill Joel and one that illuminates why Ellie decides to let Abby live at the very end of the game. The rest serve to extend the playtime pointlessly and are all very low-stakes and boring, since even when there is gameplay, you know it can't have any effect on the main timeline.

So even though the theme for the whole game seems to be "Revenge and cycles of violence are bad," the way everything is handled really just makes it "killing people you know is bad, but not always." Which is pretty dumb.
Additionally the final flashback tries to reframe things around Ellie's inability to forgive Joel and how her anger was partially because that chance was taken from her, but the rest of the game has even less to add to that so it only makes the ten hours you play as Abby and most of the characters that are added feel even more pointless.

The greatest strength of the first game (I mentioned it in my review) is that the gameplay is so in line with the theme and narrative the game explores. Your struggle and desperation to find resources and survive mirrors Joel and Ellie's struggle as they attempt to reach their goal. It puts you in Joel's shoes and effectively prepares you for the decisions he makes at the end of the game.
The Last of Us Part 2 convinces me that the team (Neil Druckman?) had no idea what made that game powerful and successful. Part 1 cribs its narrative from post-apocalyptic fiction (specifically The Road), which is a genre that outlines verbs that map incredibly strongly to gameplay -- specifically Resident Evil-style survival horror gameplay. Part 2 skews so far from this that it really feels like they stumbled into this successful formula, rather than intentionally targeting it. As if they applied really great technical execution to what was already on the page and it worked out.
Part 2 is not at all about survival or desperation, so scavenging for scraps and making do with what you can find runs much more counter to Ellie and Abby, who are just smashing their way through anyone in their way. The sole area that felt really good to me was when Ellie first gets to Seattle, where the scavenging gameplay turns into a hunt for clues to the group Ellie is chasing and how to get to them. The rest of the game absolutely could have been structured this way (Ellie using the theatre as a base of operations to hunt down Abby's crew and an alternate approach to Abby's section) and the narrative would have aligned more successfully with the gameplay.

Along with the initial Seattle area, the game does have some super strong moments. The village assault during Abby's section stands out as a cool set piece even if the boss fight at the end is uninspired. Most of the level design in the game doesn't work quite as well as the first game though. I found the stealth/combat arenas to be largely less interesting and expressive, with what felt like more triggered events and unavoidable firefights.

I liked The Last of Us Part 1 much more than I thought I would and this game was an extreme disappointment to me. I would write paragraphs more about the problems with the narrative (I didn't even touch on Dina, Mel, Jesse, or the pointless extra Santa Barbara faction that gets introduced), but there really isn't a need to.
People like this game, so maybe you will too, but I honestly cannot recommend anything about it.