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Developer: Dream On Studio | Publisher: Eidos |
| Release Date: May 15, 2007 | Also On: None |
Most gamers who have been to an arcade are aware of those games which are played with a gun, you know, the ones where you have to actually take the gun and shoot the enemies before they get to the front of the screen and smack you. On early consoles such as the NES, games of that type were released meant to interact with a lightgun accessory that could be bought for the system, from which such classics as Duck Hunt are known. But this particular genre of game has fallen by the wayside for the most part in recent years, with no console since the SNES that I am aware of having a significantly used lightgun accessory available for it at any time during its lifespan.
The DS, with its touch-screen capabilities, is able to handle a sort of adapted version of this concept, where instead of having to shoot the enemies with a gun, you have to touch them with the stylus to shoot them. That potential has been pretty much overlooked, however, until now. Eidos has made the first game of this type for the system that I am aware of in Touch The Dead, which revolves around a man shooting undead people in a prison in an effort to escape. Is this first effort a game worth having in your collection? Read on to find out.
Graphically, Touch The Dead is competent. The undead people look and move like undead people very convincingly, even though you probably won’t have too much time to notice that. The environments that you will traverse through look very prison-like as well. Granted, the level of detail in this game is not quite up there with the level of detail that has been proven possible on the DS, but everything looks reasonably realistic nonetheless. My main complaint, if you can call it that, is that the blood of the undead people when you shoot them doesn’t spurt nearly as much as I had expected given this game’s M rating. I personally do not mind this, as I wasn’t really all that interested in seeing a lot of blood and guts, but the true fans of this type of game might be disappointed.
On the sound front, there’s very little to say. As with most third-party DS games, there is no voice acting. Even the undead people don’t make the whining noise that has become so typical of undead in games like this over the past few years, which is disappointing. The guns sound reasonably like they should though, and the music is appropriately foreboding given the environment in which the game takes place. Still, I can’t help but think that not quite as much was done with the sound as what could have been done.
In terms of gameplay, this game is just what you would expect. Your guy moves automatically until he finds himself in a position where he has to shoot some enemies, at which point he stops and you shoot them. When you kill them all, he starts moving again, and the process continues. This concept is just fine in the arcade where the challenge is that your aim actually has to be good for you to get anywhere, but in this game, aim isn’t important. To fire, you take the stylus and touch the spot on the screen that you want to shoot at.
At least the game does have this going for it; it matters where you shoot at. Shooting an arm seems to have a different effect than shooting a head or a leg, etc. Such differences aren’t anything that are overly worth bothering with for the most part, as you’ll have very little time for precise aim. Still, at the end of the level you’ll be graded on how many enemies you shot in each different general part of the body and it will affect your end-of-level ranking.
The game is also a little bit more than just running and shooting. Each weapon has a number of upgrades that you will find for it, from quickening how long it takes to reload your weapon to increasing the weapon’s power. There are four different weapons in this game, and they are all appropriate for a game such as this, although I must question the wisdom of making the short-range weapon the third one that you find. Still, these extra weapons and upgrades keep the game from becoming too monotonous too fast.
I will admit this also: the game works well, and it utilizes the touch-screen well. With the exception of switching weapons, a mechanic that is not necessary at the beginning of the game because you don’t have multiple weapons until later on, everything is handled with the touch-screen and the stylus. Remember though that everything is shooting and reloading. Nobody can accuse this game of being particularly deep. Its plot isn’t deep, and its concept isn’t deep, but this is the type of game that isn’t meant to be deep, so that is forgivable.
Still, the game comes off as a bit simplistic for a DS game. That is the least of its problems though. As I said, both firing and reloading are handled by the touch-screen. This means that when you run out of ammo, you have to stop tapping enemies to shoot them long enough to grab ammo and drag it into your clip, after which there will be an animation where your guy actually reloads his gun. All told, you’re usually out about at least a second and a half, if not two seconds, by the time you actually finish reloading, and this problem is alleviated little by finding the upgrade to reload faster since more of the time is spent dragging the ammo than in the reloading animation most of the time.
As if that isn’t bad enough, the enemies tend not only to appear in groups, but in fairly sizable ones. Having four or more enemies on the screen when you start firing at them is not uncommon, and there are even sequences where the enemies keep coming from the sides of the screen for a while and you have to constantly shoot and reload and shoot and reload without letting them get close enough to attack you. Needless to say, not only does this get old fairly quickly, but it also ramps the difficulty up to a significantly high level beyond what most people will be patient with.
In the game’s defense, however, the game is not entirely about shooting enemies over and over again. Some of the levels actually have bosses. When you fight a boss, there will be a certain part or parts of the boss that you will have to attack in order to hurt it. Still, these bosses aren’t enough to take away from the fact that most of the game is just attacking the same normal undead enemies over and over. Also, you can fire at boxes and other environmental features to gain powerups that will increase your health, and each level also has a special item that will unlock some bonus stuff if you can find it.
I should mention also that the levels have divergent paths at some points, at which point you will have to shoot a sign with an arrow on it to tell the game which path you want to take. Also, at some points, you will have to shoot a switch to open a door. These two mechanics, although they have nothing to do with enemies, are not particularly that exciting in and of themselves and add very little to the game as a whole.
So far as replay value is concerned, there is quite a bit more here than meets the eye if you are a fan of the game. The game is not particularly long, even if you play it long enough to beat it, something which is questionable given the repetitiveness of it. However, it will probably take you longer to beat this game than the game’s actual length due to its difficulty. Should you manage to beat this game, you will unlock two other modes of play. In one, the weapons are acquired at the same rate as in the first game but the enemies are more furious, and, in the other, the enemies are more furious but you start with all weapons and unlimited ammo.
There are two other things that could potentially add replay value to this game as well. First of all, you could revisit all of the levels and try to find the item in each to unlock the bonus content. Given the aforementioned fact that some of the levels have multiple paths, this in itself could add a significant amount of playtime to the game if one actually wanted to bother to find all of them. Also, this game does have a two-player cooperative mode in it. However, this mode requires multi-card play. Seriously, this game is simple enough that you’d think single-card multiplayer could be done, but it still isn’t. So yes, this game does have a lot to offer to increase the replay value, but I am tempering the replay value score in light of the fact that most people won’t bother to take advantage of all of this playtime that the game has to offer.
What then is my conclusion? This game has the potential to last a long time, but only the few who are truly interested in this type of game will have the patience to see through that potential. For the masses, this game is repetitive and has very little to commend itself for play over long periods of time. Therefore, I’d say that, unless you’re a diehard fan of this type of game, you would be better off playing something else. However, Touch the Dead shows that this genre does have some potential on the DS, so I hope that someday somebody will take that potential and flesh it out into a somewhat deeper game that is more worthy of widespread attention.
| Graphics: | 6 |
| Sound: | 6 |
| Gameplay: | 5 |
| Creativity: | 4 |
| Replay Value/Game Length: | 6 |
| Final: | 5.5 |
| Written by Martin | Review Guide |
