Don't complain about the controls if you haven't played the tutorial, as it's very clear most have not.
These people, who count the the Gamespot reviewer among their ranks, clearly never completed the ten minute controls tutorial.
Admittedly, the controls are not intuitive, but they are perfectly serviceable once you understand them.
Most people seem to think that pressing the arm button sends your arm forward, and that to send it diagonally requires the joystick to be held in the diagonal position. This is not the case.
When the joystick is neutral, the arm will shoot diagonally upwards. When it is tilted forward, the arm will shoot forwards, and when it is up the arm will shoot up.
Once you're latched on press the arm button to reel in, or forward to begin your swing. Then you can press down to end your swing prematurely, and forward again to jump off your swing. Yes, this scheme can be confusing, and if you don't do the tutorial you might never even realize it works like this way (I didn't understand the controls before doing the tutorial, and it would be easy to play through the entire game without understanding them.)
However, once you understand the control scheme (the tutorial takes less than ten minutes) it becomes obvious why the developers chose to keep it (it was the same in the NES version.) The freedom of movement it offers is amazing. Once you get good at it you will be swinging around in complex patterns and pulling off insane feats of skill that feel satisfying to pull off and look impressive to boot.
In addition to this there are several arm "tricks" which the advanced tutorials teach, and which feel even more satisfying to pull off and also look very impressive.
To say that the arm "seems to have a mind of its' own" is utterly ridiculous. The controls function perfectly once you understand them. It's disappointing to me that the Gamespot reviewer failed to even understand the control scheme before he embarked on his review.