I was reading an article in the Wall Street Journal the other day about the state of the economy, and video games. The short of it is, while no industry is “recession proof”, most analysts (and the sale figures of game retailers) show little to worry about in the video game industry. Despite increased unemployment, a housing crisis, the weak American dollar, and increasing cost of necessities across the board, it seems people just can’t stop buying video games.

And I’m kind of one of them.

I’ve sort of lost my day job recently, you see, and not a week goes by that I’m not hurting for money in some way. But the night before last I found myself, again, leaning over the counter of VGNY (www.videogamesnewyork.com) in the East Village, trying to decide just what game to buy with the extra cash I somehow managed to scrape together this week. Man, it was a sad moment. I felt like a crack addict. Hell, video games are starting to reach crack prices. You’ve got to understand how long I stood there quizzing Dan and Jen of VGNY, on every new game, dozens of customers managing to come in, do their business, and leave the store again, in the time I spent grilling the back of every game box I could get my hands on. Did I mention my girlfriend was with me the whole time? Brilliant date-night – dinner, a walk around the city, and an hour of me complaining about not knowing which game to buy (with money I should be using to pay the electric bill). Thank god she’s a gamer herself, or I’m sure she’d have left me ages ago. I can only imaging how dealing with my vinyl addiction (records, not toys, although you better believe I sink some money into vinyl toys as well) already tests her patience, but throwing in video games too? There’s only so much geekery any woman can reasonable be expected to put up with.

Anyway, after spending the better part of an hour wallowing in indecisiveness in my favorite underground NYC game shop, I settled on Dark Sector. Dan, from VGNY, gave it his recommendation, and after so much Lost Odyssey last month, I guess my desire to kill monsters in brutal and increasingly inventive ways, was reignited. Maybe that’s why the video game industry weathers recessions so well – even when times are tough, or especially when they’re tough, people never loose the desire to vent their frustrations by, say, throwing a razor-blade boomerang through a renegade Soviet soldier’s head.

So I bought a full-priced game, a rarity for me (if any of you have seen my GamerTag – “Dylan Garret” – I’ll have you know any new games I’ve played have been generously donated by the aforementioned girlfriend). And it’s not bad, Dark Sector. It did the trick, giving me some shit to kill while not thinking about rent or how I really need new work.

Here’s where I tell you what Dark Sector plays like, although I’m going to keep it short, because I have the feeling you’ve heard this before. It’s an over-the-shoulder shooter, the kind where you hold the left trigger to zoom in and the right trigger to shoot, where you have to utilize cover to keep from getting killed, and develop some super-human powers to aid in your killing (and to differentiate the game from whatever other third-person, over-the-shoulder shooter you’ve been playing this month). Oh, and you can also buy and upgrade weapons at “black market” shops throughout the game to beef up your guns in addition to your naturally-developing sci-fi powers.

If you said, “Hey, that sounds like Gears Of War!” you’d probably be a bit right. If you thought it sounded a bit like Mass Effect’s battle system and biotic powers, minus the intense RPG elements and coherent storyline, you’d also be right. If you think it sounds like… you know what, whatever game you’re thinking of, I can tell you, you’re probably right. And if you already know the type of game, we can skip the boring exposition and get on to whether or not it’s worth spending any part of your upcoming governmental Economic Stimulus Check on.

There’s something I used to say in music reviews, about what I was looking for in a new album. I’d say that I think a musician should either try to do something original, or try to do something better than it’s been done before. I suppose the same could be said about video games. Dark Sector definitely falls into the latter category. There’s nothing strikingly original about its gameplay, but it does have the balls to think it’s doing the over-the-shoulder shooter genre better than its competitors.

Whether or not it does is up to you. Personally, I think it tries hard enough to count. After finishing the game tonight, I’m not sure if I’m dying to start up another play-through in “Brutal” mode, but I’ve certainly enjoyed the past 10 hours of slicing shit up nice. And let me say, while I’m sure the main comparison made to Dark Sector will be Gears Of War, the holy grail of 360 third-person shooters, I really preferred Dark Sector more.

I’ll give you a moment to collect your hate.

Hey, I’m not going to bullshit you. Gears was okay fun, but maybe because I didn’t pick it up myself until after Halo 3 and a price drop came out, it didn’t revolutionize my world or anything. To tell you the truth, I still haven’t beaten it. Not a bad game, but I just got kind of bored during it and decided to play Dead Rising again. So when I say I liked Dark Sector more than Gears, you’ve got to understand it’s coming from someone who was never that devoted to Gears in the first place.

I guess I just like the pacing in Dark Sector more. The story itself isn’t anything special. The short of it is, there’s some kind of terrible infection going around some fictional former Soviet state, and your bad-ass CIA operative character with a shady past gets infected in the first mission. Unlike the other poor saps who become completely infected and turn into crazed, boil-covered monsters, you were lucky enough to only be wounded in your right arm, granting one of your limbs crazy super powers and a razor-sharp boomerang, while saving your mind from indoctrination (though still leaving you with what appears to be a really bad hangover).

And that’s the gimmick. The infection develops over time, hardening the skin, and granting powers to the infected. This leads to some cool pacing, where early stages of the game feature your arm, boil-covered and fairly useless, battling against fleshy zombies that can be killed in one hit, and are much less of a liability than the renegade Soviet hazmat soldiers chasing you. As the game progresses, the skin on your arm hardens into something sleek and superhero-like in its power and visual appeal, while the infected enemies also develop from weak zombies into walking tanks with powers equal to your own. It keeps you playing. The game will start to get tough, then an evolution of your own powers gives you some skill that enables you to decimate a room full of enemies without so much as messing up a single strand of your indie-chic hair-do, then slowly gets harder again until reaching a point where you don’t know how you’re going to keep playing, when another power-up hits you and you’re back to badass. The timing is just right.

And the powers are nice too. They’re fun, simply put. The glaive, your razor-boomerang, is fairly useless to start, hard to aim, and weaker than two pistol shots to the head. You’re likely (no pun intended) to stick to your guns early on. Once you develop the ability to use After Touch (slowing down Matrix-like after throwing the glaive, and being able to control its flight with the right analog stick to navigate around corners and enemy cover for the picture-perfect decapitation), the glaive becomes more and more handy. Other powers include shields, invisibility, energy bursts, and increased damage. Soon you might fight entire levels without a bullet fired, preferring you take down your enemies with a little more style using only the glaive. There’s even an Achievement for it.

And yes, I’m well aware that it’s a gimmick. All these games have to have one. You know, something cool to put on the back of the box and make the game seem different from all the other games like it (and believe me, I looked at the backs of many boxes in that game store the other night). But this one works really well. I mean, it worked well enough to keep me playing, and finishing the game in a couple of days, while Marcus Fenix is still sitting in suspended animation somewhere on a middle-chapter save-file in Gears Of War.

I guess the final verdict is, if you’re as poor as me, you aren’t missing out on any new revelations in gaming by holding off until a price drop or some more expendable income. Dark Sector is one of those games where you’ll play through its 10 hour story, maybe rock a few online matches with your friends, then probably shelve for a while (until, one random day, you remember how fun it is to navigate the glaive through a tight hole in a fence and cut a bad guy standing beyond in half, and decide to put the game back in for another run). If you’re not like me, and don’t need to agonize over which game to pick-up for fear of how long it’ll be until you can afford a new one, definitely give Dark Sector a shot.