There's plenty of games out there that let you wield melee weapons in combat. Everyone loves knifing people in Call of Duty and Battlefield, and lots of games have trademark melee weapons -- the crowbar in Half-Life, for instance, or the wrench in BioShock. Heck, even Gears of War has a chainsaw on the end of the Lancer.
If you think about it, though, melee weapons really aren't any different from shooting someone with a gun: the only difference is their effective range and usually their ability to kill with a single blow. Admittedly, there are some exceptions: Skyrim forces you to hack and slash through creatures and even the lowly headcrabs in Half-Life 2 require a good beating before falling before your crowbar. Still, the weapons are fairly simplistic in their execution: point and click, resulting in damage being dealt so long as you're close enough to hit.
War of the Roses dismisses the notion that melee weapons are simple and mundane and asks -- nay, demands -- that you make intelligent decisions when wading into combat. This ain't no point-and-click hack-'n'-slasher, mate! This is medieval combat at its finest!
