I played the demo now three times, with three different approaches for the fight: stealth, melee, gun...all worked rather well, but stealth is the best as you don't use any of your scarce resources. Also watched a playthrough from another guy...totally different, felt crazy!
Impressive for me: fights are very dynamic and tense, you include the surrounding stuff naturally in the brawl. Also, you don't feel like a superhero, even your melee weapon (if you have one) breaks apart after some hefty hits. You cannot jump. You can climb.
What I liked most: the ingame character models, the faces, look unbelievable good. Not only Joel, but also Ellie and the woman.
Some more stuff:
- the girls and you are chatting a lot and commenting the scene, helps a lot for the atmosphere. The AI seems rather smart.
- crazy amount of detail, e.g. When I point the flashlight towards the woman, she guards her eyes with her hand...although, she does it sometimes and not every time?! Another example: when I use my gun and stand right beside Ellie...she jerks and is scared...when I shoot: not only the body jerks, but her face clearly shows that she feels uncomfortable...crazy!
- the animations look top notch, similar to the ones in Uncharted but this time everything feels a lot smoother and hence more natural.
- the flashlight is very well done. Everything casts nice shadows. I am currently playing Dead Space 3 on my PC with highest settings...but your coop buddy does not cast a shadow when I use my gun flashlight.
- the pace of the game is slow: taking a medic kit takes several seconds, even changing your gun takes a while as Joel has to get it from his backpack.
- sound design is top notch, rather perfect so far.
- as Gitarro said, environment is non-interactive.
- I think that the muted colors in this scene help to hide jaggies. When I am looking for high contrast stuff using the flashlight, you can clearly see the aliasing issues this game has...I guess at daylight, we have to expect some prominent aliasing artifacts.
- the start screen shows a window at daylight...the lighting looks freaking amazing!!
Cannot wait for the full game to arrive, I hope it is not too scarry...Metro Last Light was already at the limit for me