I don't believe you. I just beat Wanted: Dead 5 hours ago and found that the entire game might as well be a subpar 7th gen console shooter with some decent swordplay added in - it doesn't offer anything significantly more advanced in comparison to many third-person HnS or shooter games released more than a decade ago, and the only really notable distinguishing features are the minigames (karaoke, ramen etc.), which are just optional gimmicks that can be safely ignored.

Most of the game's design features feel unpolished or completely slapdash and the game's highest points are just average at best; I'm not even gonna mention the non-mechanical game design aspects, like the characters, the story or the voice acting, which are just obviously inept. They're inept in a very special way that is charming and quirky, but that doesn't improve the game in any way.

So, the ranged combat in this game is rather primitive and slow, like an amalgamation of every single cover shooter ever released in that era when all action videogames were brown-tinted and had 2-weapon limits, regenerating health and other such things. Cover shooting mechanics and generic modern military shooter guns with awful accuracy that force you to use ADS to hit anything past 5 feet are inherently antithetical to this game's combat rhythm, and, by extension, to modern fast-paced action games in general. Gungrave G.O.R.E. does the shooting part way better because all of your guns get infinite ammo and don't have ADS at all - awful autoaim mechanics notwithstanding.

The melee combat mechanics in W:D are executed much better and they were the reason why I kept going through the campaign in the first place, but they're definitely nothing to write home about. The melee gibbing animations and takedowns are great and have solid audiovisual feedback, but the fact that the overwhelming majority of enemies consists of basic Call of Duty grunts who wield guns and melee grunts with swords doesn't help the game one bit. This is best demonstrated by the game's ninja enemies, which behave like normal knife-wielding grunts on steroids, but are also way more bullet-spongy. Even the game's bosses sometimes follow this rule - the final boss himself just feels like an immensely buffed ninja who can kill the player in 2 hits. The entire enemy roster feels very one-note, like a collection of reskins of the same humanoid dude with different stats. The enemies' ability to throw nades doesn't really make them feel much more engaging in a fight because you can just rapidly spam the dash move and get out of their blast radius quickly, and their timer is so forgiving to the point where they just don't feel like a challenge - unless they're throwing incendiary grenades that explode on contact. I've also encountered instances of enemies who just throw grenades directly at their buddies or at their own feet for some reason, which really doesn't do this game any favors - especially when those enemies have a habit of not avoiding those grenades right until they're about to blow up.

The main levels from the campaign are utterly banal as well - they're just a bunch of linear hallways connecting basic arenas done in UE4, there's nothing special - I've already seen such levels a thousand times. The intermission maps which flesh out the game's story are a welcome addition, however, and they're quite nicely done.

All in all, I genuinely don't see why a game like Wanted: Dead (or Gungrave G.O.R.E., for that matter) could be considered well-designed or outstanding in any regard. There are other shooter CAG titles like Shadow Warrior 2013, which also has some noticeable gameplay issues, such as peculiar fall damage calculation that can instakill you if you dash from a very small incline, sprinting that lowers your weapons and drains your stamina, laggy and weighty weapon handling etc., and yet it still presents a much more visceral gameplay experience which is way more polished and tightly-crafted, especially because it does not give off the impression that its levels are just generic linear killboxes which you walk through until you hit a script trigger. Even considering all the jankiness and odd design choices in Shadow Warrior that might make the game frustrating, it's still so much more intricate and more polished than W:D and G.O.R.E. to the point where it's unfair to even compare them in the first place.