THE HUB

OMG!!!

FEATURED GAME

FEATURED MEMBER

DoctorIrish

DoctorIrish

The Doctor is in.

QUICK POLL

Grand Theft Auto IV: does it live up to the hype?

ASK THE PROS

THE GAMEPROS

FREE NEWSLETTERS

Sign up now to receive weekly or daily updates on your favorite games, stories, and more!



DS | Action | Touch the Dead

There is no Boxart for - Touch the Dead
  • GRAPHICS: 3.50
  • SOUND: 1.75
  • CONTROL: 3.00
  • FUN FACTOR 2.75
  • AVG USER SCORE n/a
  • AVG CRITIC SCORE 2.4

Review: Touch the Dead

Review by Patrick Shaw | 05/15/2007 | 13:59:56 PM PST

Touch the Dead, a watered down House of the Dead-style zombie grinder, has infested the Nintendo DS, and even though the game's graphics are laughably bad, exploding the faces of the undead with your stylus is actually a lot of fun in a cheesy horror movie kind of way.

Despite the name, the game has nothing to do with an erotic attraction to corpses. Instead, players take on the role of Rob, a prisoner serving a life sentence who must escape by shooting his way through hordes of zombies in locations such as a penitentiary and a swamp.

Arm Yourself

In the game, you're armed with a machine gun, a shot gun, a pistol, and a crowbar to tear through zombies, bats, giant leeches, ghosts, and even zombies that rip their own heads off and chuck them at you. Boss fights in Touch the Dead, which are at the end of each mission, add variety to the game as each boss has their own unique weak spots.

The biggest flaw of the game lies in its awkward reloading system. You have to click and drag an onscreen clip into your gun with the stylus to refill the various firearms. Not only is this unwieldy at the best of times, but it also kicks start a long reload animation that often gets you into trouble. Sometimes there will be so many enemies on the screen at once that reloading in time to avoid getting gnarled is impossible.

Why the developer didn't let you just use one of the shoulder buttons to automatically trigger a reload is beyond me. As it stands, Touch the Dead is like a decent B-grade horror movie: sure it's laughably bad at points but there's a loveable camp quality to it that makes it worth enduring through.

Pros: Gory zombie blasting action. Using the stylus to bust zombie heads is fun.
Cons: Fugly graphics. Reloading your weapon is unnecessarily difficult.

Don't feel like wasting your time on this game? Try House of the Dead instead. Still not your style? Maybe you'll find something more to your liking at our Reviews Index.