TF2 and Borderlands cheat because the melee is simple and one-sided; if you're in melee range, you're doing damage, the end.
Dead Island seems to be a little more refined but for the most part you're just up against slow as shit dumb fucking zombies.
If you ask me, if you want to do effective melee combat in first-person 3D, then look at the elements of effective combat in third-person 3D. Most of them still apply.
So Devil May Cry, God of War, Bayonetta and ok sometimes Dynasty Warriors all employ a couple common tricks to make the 3D foightin' work:
* The range of the weapon is always a bit longer than the actual weapon. In GoW this is obvious; Bayonetta has little effect splashes that increase her range; the DW series gives everyone little wind slices as an actual stat, and DMC just kind of tells you to accept it.
* Basic movement stuff: a block, a dodge, and some form of dash move to close the gap.
* Easy 2-3 button combinations. None of this fancy/useless directional attack shit. The player needs to be in control of his/her attack while at the same time not really thinking about it.
* Targeting and auto-targeting.
* Something to do BESIDES just basic attacking. The Devil Mode/Musou/QTE stuff breaks up a fight that would otherwise just be MASH BUTAN.
* Enemies all have readable attacks.
* Enemies don't clock you in the back of the head from offscreen, or if they do, there's a reasonable way to either tell they're going to or oherwise prevent them from doing so.
...wow, that was a longer list than I thought. There's probably a lot more in there, too.
Anyway, I think if people took their cues from DMC for first-person combat instead of trying to ape some weirdly mechanical system like a wrestling game, it'd suddenly turn out to be a perfectly viable and quite fun little subgenre.
