The DS may be the perfect system for a great on-rails shooter, but Touch the Dead definately isn't it.
The game starts in Ashdown Hole State Penitentiary, where the main character, a generic prisoner named Rob Steiner, framed for a crime he didn't commit, is about to be transferred. Too bad for him, his cell door falls open in the middle of the night and he uses it as a chance to escape. He soon finds out that everyone in the immediate vicinity has been turned into blood-thirsty zombies. The game takes off from here as soon as Rob finds a handgun. You move around levels without the option to choose where you want to go, shooting whatever crosses your path, like in House of the Dead. You can tap the screen to shoot any and every zombie that you see, or you'll die. Your helath will decrease every time a zombie slashes/punches/throws something at you. You can only take an amount of damage relevant to the number of health pick-ups you've collected by shooting them throughout the level. One big problem here is that you have to start back up at the very beginning of the level if you die. That's right. No checkpoints here.
Shooting zombies works out to be somewhat fun on the DS for a while, but there's only about 4 different character models in the whole game so you'll only be shooting Generic Fat Zombie, Generic Skinny Zombie #1, Generic Skinny Zombie #2, and Generic Cop Zombie throughout the game. While shooting may have its fun at first, it gets old fast. Reloading is a pain with the touch screen, and more often than not you'll be struggling to keep your health up. In order to reload you have to drag and drop a clip from one end of the screen to the other, which will put a cramp into your hand faster than you'd think. There's a bunch of different levels in the game, and a few bosses here and there as well. On the down side, there are only four weapons in the game: a shotgun, machine gun, handgun, and a crowbar; you'll have had your share of all of them by the fourth level. Again, the entire game stops being fun very quickly, and the graphics are only 3D enough to tell what's going on. The sound effects are dull and repetitive, and the music is sub-par.
While the entire idea of an on-rails shooter for the DS may sound great on paper, and shooting zombies is fun while it lasts with all of 4 weapons in the game, Touch the Dead is a long, boring, and hard shooter that isn't worth my money as well as yours.