Metareview: Touch the Dead
The reviews were slow to come in on Touch the Dead -- which usually indicates a dud. From the scores, it looks like that cliché may really be a fair assessment of the title's merits. With a current metascore of 58%, Touch the Dead is less OMG-zombie scary and more scary like Grandma's lingerie.
Game Informer: 66% (average of two reviews) - "What you imagine to be headshot city is, in reality, the most challenging zombie game to come along in quite some time. As the zombies struggle to walk, their heads jerk about violently, making it an incredible test of skill ... this is a game that every zombie fanatic could love, but only the hardest of hardcore gamers can excel at." (Issue 170, p117)
Game Almighty: 45% - "The first thing you notice when the game starts is the awful graphics. Touch the Dead reinvents what it means to have jaggies. Everything is pixilated and bland and the closer the zombies come, the worse it gets. Ironic, because the bad graphics actually inspire you to kill the creatures when they're as far away as possible, lest you think your DS has a broken graphics chip."
GameSpot: 55% - "Every time you empty a clip, you have to manually reload by dragging the stylus from the ammo icon on the lower right-hand part of the screen to the clip icon on the lower left-hand part of the screen. While it certainly injects a little tension into the game, you quickly get to the point where you have to reload your clip after every zombie you take down, so you actually end up spending more time reloading your weapon than you do shooting zombies. It feels unnatural and can be difficult to consistently reload fast enough when you have a swarm of zombies bearing down on you."
