I recently bought Dead Island as a part of the Steam summer sale, having heard it was a decent enough game and also because of Criken's "Adventures of Sam B" (...OK, so it was entirely the latter, sue me). The game sells itself as a "zombie apocalypse RPG," which was a combination that made myself and a lot of other nerds extremely excited for no other reason than a high concentration of geek-tingling buzz words. I've played about ten hours total now, thanks to a completely empty Sunday, and I've come to one conclusion: as a game, Dead Island is fun, simple and unique enough to entertain, and overall enjoyable, even in a single player mode. But as an RPG, it falls flat on its face.

Dead Island is and RPG in the same way a bike is a motorcycle- there are a lot of similarities and they're lumped together quite often, but there's important distinctions to make. While the differences between Dead Island and an RPG aren't quite as stark, it's worth noting. Dead Island has all the typical RPG elements: leveling system, a skill tree, customizable weapons, quests and rewards. But the part that renders all of this useless is the difficulty curve.

As with any RPG, you start off at level one, and are thrown to some level one zombies to do battle with. The first few missions are story-based, so as you progress to the new areas quickly, the enemies level up with you and it all makes sense. But after a while you reach a questing hub: a base camp you need to return to every so often, meaning you're going to be in the area a lot. There's nothing wrong with this approach, and for the genre of zombies, it's the only thing that makes sense.

However, as you stick around the same area, you gain experience and level up as normal. But the enemies do to, at exactly the same rate. Essentially, when you're level five all you fight are level five zombies, when you're level six all you fight are level six zombies, and so on and so forth.

What a typical RPG world map does is designate certain monsters of certain levels to certain areas. So, for example, Area 1 only has levels 2-4 and Area 2 has levels 3-7. This means that if the player finds Area 2 to be too much of a challenge, they can retreat to Area 1 to rest, relax, and get some more experience or practice without too much risk. The concrete levels also make for the concept of leveling up much more critical: if you know a boss is level 10, then you can always train and get past level 10 if you really need to. Grinding experience is a failsafe measure in case a player simply cannot beat a boss by normal means, and in addition, leveling up and making your character stronger is a lot of fun and gives a nice sense of empowerment.

Dead Island strips all that away. Enemies are always on the same level as you, or at least within two. Therefore, if you're having trouble on that boss fight, grinding to get stronger only makes him stronger too. All the skills you obtain to do more damage become useless, since as you gain a level every enemy has more health anyway. What's fun in an RPG is powering up and practicing, then being able to go back and one-shot the baddies that gave you so much trouble before. With this, it's really just the same fight over and over, and gets harder because they throw more zombies at you. And since they never get any weaker, it's nearly impossible to fight more than two or three at a time, let alone six or seven.

I've come to find this mechanic is introduced in order to help the cohesion of online co-op, though since that's not something I'm interested in unless with friends, it doesn't do me much good. Overall I like Dead Island as a zombie survival-type game, but the RPG elements feel poorly executed. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion had this same sort of problem, but the ramping up of enemy difficulty was much more gradual and by the end, even necessary. It's a mechanic that can work, but not at such a sharp curve. You're liable to break something falling against it.