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»Touch the Dead
"WARNING: Contains no necrophilia."
For those of you who have listened to my incomprehensible ramblings in the various chats or posts in the forum, you’ll know that I hate first-person shooters (Halo/CS/Half-Life fans, start your hatemail!). Yet, at the same time, I’ve always been a fan of lightgun shooters, be they in the arcade or at home. Conflicting, right? When I heard that Touch the Dead (“Dead ‘n’ Furious” as it was originally titled in the US [and still titled in Europe]) was coming to the DS, I instantly thought “HOUSE OF THE DEAD CLONE? HURRAY!”
In TtD, you take on the role of Rob Steiner, prisoner #1094 in Ashdown Hole State Penitentiary. On the night before his transfer to another prison, he notices that there are no guards nearby. He escapes from his cell to see the prison, crawling with zombies. Armed only with the pistol he found on the floor, he knows that it’s either kill or be killed.
The gameplay is fairly decent. Stylus-controlled light-gun games may not be as good as the real deal, but it kicks the crap out of the old cursor ones (like the home versions of Lethal Enforcers). Basically, it’s an on-rail shooter where you travel across the entirety of Ashdown Hole in order to find and destroy every zombie in the area. There are a variety of opponents. Some are zombies that are shirtless and decayed while others have tattered police uniforms on, and even some enemies are zombie rats (kinda like those leeches from House of the Dead). Hell, some zombies even tear off their heads and chuck them at you. On top of that, each enemy takes a different number of shots to kill. Another nice thing is that shots register in different areas. So, if you hit a zombie in the head, its face will start bleeding, or if you hit one enough times in the stomach, it’ll burst open. There are also a variety of weapons you can pick up in the game, including a shotgun and a crowbar (which you slash across the screen, instead of tapping it, like all the other weapons), but most of these have finite ammo while your standard pistol has limitless ammo. There are also a few bosses which can only be hurt in certain areas - another nice touch.
Of course, all’s not perfect. For starters, this game’s “reload” function is a pain in the ass. You have to drag a new clip of bullets from the bottom-right corner of the screen over to the gun’s chamber (on the bottom-left corner). This gets annoying, especially when you’re being overrun with zombies. I mean to switch weapons you’d just have to hit a direction on the D-Pad. Why couldn’t they assign reload to the R trigger or something? I mean, that seems way more the standard “fire off-screen” method of reloading seen in most arcade shooters. Another problem I have is with the game’s stage design. It’s not that the stages are too hard; they’re just too damn long. And no checkpoints! It takes like 20 minutes to get through one stage; it’s annoying. That’s false difficulty, and the lack of checkpoints get to you if you basically get your ass handed to you by the boss.
The graphics lie somewhere between those of the old House of the Dead for the Sega Saturn and GoldenEye for the N64. Granted, that’s not terrible, but it’s a testament to the fact that the DS’s graphical forte is 2D. Anyway, the zombies (be they chunky, slender or rat) are well-rendered, but the surroundings get bland quickly. It’s just jail, hospital, jail, sewer, etc. Granted I guess that’s what you’d expect, but you’d think they would try for a little more variety to keep everything from running together. The worst part would probably have to be most of the cinematics, which are rendered in-game, and Rob’s not as well-designed as the enemies. I wish the cutscenes used more of a comic book gimmick, like in the intro, which looked great.
The sound is okay. I do have a bit of a beef with the music. While lightgun shooters and FPSes in general tend to have a soundtrack peppered with heavy metal rock, TtD elects to have eerie music that sounds like it belongs more in a game like Silent Hill. If this game was a little more cerebral, I’d think it would fit, but it’s a pure shooter, so the soundtrack should rock. Granted, there are some nice fast-paced tunes in the boss battles, but this is what the whole soundtrack should’ve been. On the other hand, the sound effects are good, you can hear guns fire, zombies groan, and even Rob grunts when he gets chomped or slashed.
As for replay, well, the game has twelve stages and four bosses. It’s long, but really, since you can start from the last level you’ve beaten, that can shorten your first run-through. After that, you can choose to replay any stage in the game, and with each stage you beat, you unlock a new little trinket like an art gallery or the cut scenes. There’s also a two-player co-op mode, but that’s multi-card only, so you’d better hope your friend has TtD too. All-in-all, a nice effort, but it could’ve been handled better. I’m hoping for a sequel with better production values.
Article by: Wolfdogg
Posted on: May. 21st, 2007 |
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Review Recap |
| Gameplay |
| Eh, the touch-screen/light-gun action is okay, but there are some annoying aspects, such as reloading. |
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Graphics |
| They look like they’re a mix between the graphics of Goldeneye and the original House of the Dead. Unfortunately, this isn’t too impressive nowadays. |
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Sound |
| Most of the music doesn’t fit, but the sound effects are great. |
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Replay Value |
| Eh, you can replay each stage after you beat them, and there are some unlockables, but it doesn’t have much lasting value. |
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