Touch the Dead Hands-on

via ign

Remember House of the Dead? Eidos will be unleashing its own take on that classic lightgun shooter with a completely independent, but certainly hugely inspired production called Touch the Dead. We got a chance to romp through the zombie-infested halls on the Nintendo DS today, and pun intended...we had a blast.

Touch the Dead has been in the works for well over a year at Nintendo DS development house Dream On Studio, originally titled "Dead & Furious." The project's been picked up by Eidos for a May release, and team's done a pretty decent job emulating the fun of an on-rails lightgun shooter using nothing but the touch screen and stylus.

The game begins with a comic book cutscene showing you, the lead character, thrown in prison. As you mull over your time, you're awoken by a loud sound -- the door of your jail cell swings open. Of course, you want to know why...and so begins the start of Touch the Dead. Without a weapon you don't have much to do but look around, luckily a pistol with infinite ammunition's been conveniently tossed on the floor in one of the rooms.

Touch the Dead automatically moves you through the corridors of the prison -- all you have to worry about are the seemingly endless number of zombies that are wandering your way to get their taste of fresh prisoner blood. A simple tap-tap-tap on the screen will fire your weapon to that specific location, and headshots seem to be the best way of taking out the undead. Unfortunately, while having a bottomless bag of bullets is certainly handy, you'll still have to reload after emptying your barrel. Dragging a new clip from one side of the screen to the other is a simple task, but it requires a quick swipe to do it, and that's precious time away from keeping the zombies back.

Later in the game you'll upgrade not just your weapons, but the ability to reload those weapons much more quickly. The D-pad is used to switch from one weapon to another, but you'll need to earn these guns before you can switch over to them.

Touch the Dead is a simple design that's not entirely original, but we were having a great time popping zombies in the heads with our revolver. The visuals might not be on par with, say, Resident Evil, but the game moves at a pretty rapid clip and allows for more than a half dozen zombies to stumble after you in one cluster. Shoot a zombie in the head and their heads can pop off with a nice blast of red blood -- it's clear that the game will earn an M rating when it hits store shelves.

We didn't get a chance to experience the game's two player cooperative mode, but Touch the Dead will support the local wireless feature of the Nintendo DS so that players can work together to wipe out the zombie threat.