Yes, the controller worked. It just felt unintuitive and uncomfortable.
WASD is a pretty widely accepted standard for PCs. Personally I would use both keyboard and mouse but the control style I prefer may not be in line with your goal as the developer.
I usually prefer twin-joystick style shooters on PC to have movement dictated by WASD and aiming and attacking handled by the mouse.
If it were me I'd decide if I wanted to be able to attack in four directions or eight and then split up attack states based on degrees relative to mouse position from the player object to handle the attack direction and sprite animations.