Nope. Dark Messiah of Might & Magic and Warhammer vermintide & Darktide disagree. Melee combat is amazing in both games.
DM's combat works because of all the environmental kills, when you're straight up hacking and slashing away it sucks.
Even the most simplistic encounter in Dark Messiah - fighting the most basic enemy type on flat, featureless terrain, as shown in this video - is lightyears more fun than anything we've seen from Avowed.
First of all, I love Dark Messiah of Might & Magic and its combat is anything but amazing, it's jank as hell and kick simulator which is fun but that's not because of its "melee combat". Vermintide is amazing but it's really hard to get that right, apparently even when they are proactively trying to do so since they explicitly stated they took Vermintide as inspiration.
Vermintide is just light and heavy attacks. The melee combat in Dark Messiah isn't perfect, but it's a lot more sophisticated, as different weapons have their own distinct movesets. Add in magic, archery, stealth and use of the environment and you have by far the best first-person fantasy RPG combat system.
The physics-based interactions in Dark Messiah also mean you can replay the same encounter and it will always play out differently.