A great buy for all House of the Dead fans and for those who are looking for something different for their DS.
User Rating: 8.9 | Touch the Dead DS
I have always been a huge fan of House of the Dead. I even got it when it came out on Dreamcast. There haven't been enough rail shooters out, I think. This game is a step in the right direction. This game is a good idea for the DS's touch screen. The only problems you really face come with reloads. To reload, you are required to grab the clip on the lower right side of the touch screen and drag it right onto the current clip on the lower left. If you let go without dragging it almost perfectly, you'll not get the reload and will have to try it again. But the biggest problem, and you will without a doubt have this happen more than once, is that you will try to grab the clip but instead you will have missed it barely and instead shoot your last few bullets in your current clip. This will usually happen when you see an opportunity to reload after phasing an enemy. Then you will be screwed because you have to reload because you will now be completely out of ammo and the enemy will have recovered and start to hit you again. Another problem is that you have to make your life and ammo last throughout the entire game. Only the pistol has infinite ammo, and your other guns are used usually to get you out of tight spots when you need lots of damage all at once. This said, you may have shot a little bit too liberally in a previous chapter and then the game saves. Or you will have just barely gotten out of a chapter by the skin of your teeth, with most of your health taken. The game will still save and you will be stuck with that health and that current ammo. As you move through the game, you have to use more cheap means of killing enemies with your pistol, or you have to just bring out the shotgun to finish off some of the enemies. If you run out of shotgun ammo, god help you because of the difficulty in later stages. The music in the game is enjoyable, especially the menu and boss battle music. The sounds are also quite well done. The graphics are not that bad for the DS, but I would still have liked to see better, since I have see the DS pull off quite good graphics in other games. The control in the game is different from most DS games I think, since all your control is on the touch screen. The game is lenient on many of your shots and lets some of your shots count even though you know there was no way it would have actually hit. This usually happens in long range shooting. I like how the game gives you results in how you killed enemies in order to give you more health every level. You get 2 more bars of health for every category you pass. At the end of each chapter your results are tallied as amputations: headshots, legs, body, and arms. The only problem is that you do not know what your goal is in each category until it tallies it up. Your goals seem quite random and so your only choice is to just shoot everything everywhere. If you think you have been killing too many enemies with headshots, start going for some legshots. Also a common one I miss is arm shots since they aren't a common area you shoot. I have found the game to be quite addictive, but would have preferred it to give the choice to start again at a closer checkpoint. I also would have liked there to be a scoring system that you could use to unlock things or to upgrade your weapons manually. Also I would have liked the game to be longer and for you to have a larger array of weapons. I really want to find a friend who has the game so I can play multiplayer, but it looks like you have to be near each other to do it. Overall, I am happy with my choice to buy this game. 
