Agree with IronManhood to some extent. Using physics can make character control easier if you can get your head around controlling physics objects "properly" as you don't have to calculate movement due to gravity or interactions between objects as long as they are created as physics objects.
If you still want full control and your game is not too complicated you can just use physics for the ground and use raycasting to detect where the ground is. Then you can position your character based on this. You can even get the "normal" angle, which is the reflected angle of the raycast to work out if the ground is sloped and edit your character speed based on this. It opens up a lot of functionality which CAN make things simpler than calculating them all yourself.
Using AppGameKit V2 Tier 1