Of course, you can also play with the Kinect. Here, both hands manipulate the reticule — when your right hand is raised it’s the lock-on laser, and when it’s the left you’re firing your tracer gun. The tracer gun works beautifully and is smoother and faster than a controller. The lock-on laser aims fine, but it doesn’t always recognize the pushing motion that fires the weapon. To launch “euphoria” you’ll throw your hands in the air (waiving them like you just don’t care is optional), which is the low point of the Kinect functionality as it causes the camera to go skyward. That can be disorienting.

Beyond your weapons, you can also deploy a series of entrenchments to help you in battle. Depending on your loadout you’ll have access to as many as four different turrets, each mapped to a separate direction on the d-pad. Once you’ve selected the one you want the left bumper brings up a crosshair to choose where you’d like it dropped. The right bumper turns on a magnet to gather scrap.

The game’s characters are all easily distinguishable from one another, and while not every item you equip changes your appearance, there are different families of items so by no means does every weapon or shield look the same. Magical effects course through empowered items, and one-of-a-kind items carry unique looks for some impressive results. Things tend to get hectic in combat, but the game’s frame rate never dipped even as spell effects and sword clashes filled the screen.

More damning than the slow-loading textures, though, is the general lack of variation and detail work in the environments. Having Las Vegas, a location packed with gaudy over-the-top visuals, be one of the game’s primary settings really serves to hammer home just how uninspired the areas are. Plus, even with a modest level of detail the frame rate still takes a pounding at times. It’s not limited to when the action gets frantic, either, as there are some moments that tend to get bogged down no matter what.

Where things unravel is with the momentary disconnect between when you press a button and when Thor takes action. This lag interrupts combos, ruins quick time events, makes parrying and reflecting attacks an exercise in futility and causes you to miss jumps you should make in your sleep. Had the game not featured an auto recover, which doesn’t allow Thor to sustain fall damage, there’s no telling if my controller would’ve survived the experience.

Everything works well and the feeling of dodging projectiles while alternating between your weapons is great. On occasion your mech won’t respond quite as nimbly as the situation dictates, but that’s almost certainly a design choice rather than a control flow.

Where the game struggles is when trying to create distance from enemies as it’s basically impossible to run and manipulate the camera (done via the d-pad) simultaneously. The workaround is to flee, and then press the left bumper to quickly lock onto a foe, adjusting your view in the process. It’s imprecise, though, as it causes you to come to a complete stop. Manually aiming weapons like the grenade launcher and sniper rifle is painfully slow, and it demonstrates just how dependent the game is on the auto-aiming system.