I happen to be a Towns player as well - followed it well before it became greenlit. The fault with that game is the fact that it was not properly stated as a work in progress, and before that somehow managed to get past Steam's supposed very harsh criteria of what kind of state a game must be in before it is released at all on their distribution platform. Generally people assume that Steam only sells games that are completed, so in a way I can understand why people would be ticked off - although at the same time the extreme narrow-mindedness these people show sometimes is equally annoying.
As for the VWW series, I sort of like the odd settings. Whilst far from perfect, I've still invested quite a many hours playing the first game. I was rather excited when I found out that a sequel was being made and I did give it a go. From the get-go I hated the controls though and I did spend a couple of hours trying to play before giving up due to the excessive tedium. Yes, I did get the hang of the controls in the end but that did not stop it from being very unintuitive and cumbersome.
If you absolutely insist on having a non-mouse control scheme, take a page from Gunstar Heroes. Maybe then you can get it to work. In that game you can choose whether you want to be able to run and gun towards the direction you are moving or shoot only while standing still but have a free 8-directional aim whilst doing so. Then you can have a simple WASD setup for motion and then whatever keys for your spells on the right side of the keyboard that you want. The sole drawback is that in order for either scheme to fully work is that you will sort of be required to constantly keep your "fire" button pressed down a lot in order to be flexible with the aim.
Generally though, controls should be as intuitive and flexible as possible for any kind of game regardless of genre, and nothing really beats mouse+keyboard in this regard.
