One hazy afternoon at a county fair, I discovered House of the Dead 2. A quarter a play, it quickly ate my dollars as I went into it arms akimbo. Soon after, my young self decided to try the original House of the Dead via a PC demo. Since then, I've played through every game in the franchise, watched a majority of the zombie flicks released on DVD, had a passing interest in several zombie-based flash games like The Last Stand, and even read through all of the Marvel Zombies comics to date. I won't lie, I'm a sucker for the walking dead.

So you can understand that I was pretty excited to get Touch the Dead in for review. The slick Arthur Suydam produced cover first drew my attention to the game, the appearance of a House of the Dead ripoff had me counting down the days until release. A few plays later, and all I can see is a great idea with some terrible design decisions holding it back.

Keep in mind, this isn't the first time that a shooting game has hit the DS. It's a pretty straightforward concept—using the touchscreen to emulate a lightgun. Whether it be in minigames or the form of Namco's Point Blank, the genre has proven it can be done satisfactorily on the system. In the case of Touch the Dead, the fundamentals are strong, yet the ways the game tries to differentiate itself are all bad.

In a traditional light-gun game, the player has to perform an action to reload their gun. Typically, a shot off-screen does so. Some games have a pedal for such an action. In Touch the Dead, the player is required to drag bullets across the screen and drop them into the gun. At this point, the reload takes about a second. Because of this, anything but a perfect reload will cause your character to lose a life.

This wouldn't be so much of a problem if Dream On Studio didn't ignore the first point of zombie lore: a shot to the brain takes them down. In Touch the Dead, the player is expected to shoot the heads of the standard zombies 2-3 times (it seems random) in the head to kill them, or 3-5 (again, random) in the legs to take them down. Torso shots do relatively little, as do shots to the arms

Even though the hit detection and damage outlay seem broken, I do enjoy the look and feel of zombies in the game. They move unnaturally, as you would expect zombies to move. Limbs flop around like those of a puppet, keeping you from a completely clean shot at them. Half a dozen pop up without detection, as is standard with all zombies due to the Voorhees Unreality Engine they all seem to be imbued with. I really do like the little touches put into the game, but the poor damage/hit detection system keeps it from being as good as it could be.

Touch the Dead is a mixed bag—I like where the developers were going, but the end result is horrible. A simple remap of reloading to the L button could have improved the title tenfold, and a less random feeling damage system could have lead the game to greatness. I could really see Dream On Studio's 1337 Engine finding popularity in the DS lightgun genre, but it really needs a better execution to shine.