When comparing No Man's Sky vs Beat Cop, the Slant community recommends Beat Cop for most people. In the question“What are the best indie games on Steam?” Beat Cop is ranked 35th while No Man's Sky is ranked 82nd. The most important reason people chose Beat Cop is:
Even if it's set 30 years ago, Beat Cop manages to make a statement about issues relevant today. Problems like race, police brutality, and corruption are dealt with with a good dose of satire and introspection. It throws the player into a hostile environment and asks them to make important decisions under extremely high pressure and difficulty where doing something immoral is often seen as the simplest and fastest way of reaching your goals. The quota-based system is reminiscent of the statistics-based systems many countries employ to measure a cop's performance. This blurs the line between moral and immoral choices. Do you choose to take the high road? Or do you make an immoral choice in order to reach your goals faster? This way, Beat Cop shines a light on the many difficulties policemen have to address every day and the game does so while remaining impartial and without throwing needless accusations around.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Endless procedural generation
This game procedurally generates almost everything. Your spaceships are procedurally generated, so are the planets, moons, every animal on these planets, the resource nodes, trade routes, languages, etc. When discovering new species or planets, players get to rename these and leave their mark on the galaxy.
Pro Good graphics
The art style of this game is very colorful and saturated and uses hues in a way that it gives you an otherworldly feel. Graphics like these tend to remain good for a much longer time than classic 3D graphics.
Pro Massive galaxy to explore
Thanks to the fact that the entire galaxy of No Man's Sky is procedurally generated, the amount of planets to explore is almost endless. The number of planets would be 18,446,744,073,709,551,616. However, the fact that 2 players managed to find each other in game on the first day, seems to make this number quite questionable.
Pro Seamless space to planetary flight
Pro Freedom to choose how you want to play
Ally with factions, trade or just be a pirate. When trading with NPC aliens, you build up a positive reputation with the faction they belong to. Alternatively you can also be hostile and attack trade ships, or even be attacked by NPC pirate spaceships. Both can be ways to get what you need, so do whatever suits your play style.
Pro Deals with relevant issues
Even if it's set 30 years ago, Beat Cop manages to make a statement about issues relevant today. Problems like race, police brutality, and corruption are dealt with with a good dose of satire and introspection. It throws the player into a hostile environment and asks them to make important decisions under extremely high pressure and difficulty where doing something immoral is often seen as the simplest and fastest way of reaching your goals.
The quota-based system is reminiscent of the statistics-based systems many countries employ to measure a cop's performance. This blurs the line between moral and immoral choices. Do you choose to take the high road? Or do you make an immoral choice in order to reach your goals faster? This way, Beat Cop shines a light on the many difficulties policemen have to address every day and the game does so while remaining impartial and without throwing needless accusations around.
Pro Players are required to make meaningful decisions that have meaningful consequences
In order to progress in the game, players have to make a variety of difficult decisions. For example, accepting a bribe may improve your relations with the Mafia but reduce your overall reputation with your fellow police officers. You can choose to play a good cop that plays by the rules, but it's not easy. You can issue tickets even for cars that are not breaking any laws, but those tickets count towards your daily ticket quota. Issuing them may have long-term consequences.
In order to reach their daily goals, the player must make the choice they think will get them closer to it. Whether that is the moral choice or not is entirely up to the player themselves. The right choice will reward the player, the wrong choice however can greatly penalize and set them back.
Pro Perfectly captures the feel of classic cop shows and movies
Beat Cop successfully captures the general feel of '80s shows and movies about cops. It's got all the stereotypes people find and enjoy in those shows and movies. All the cliches make it seem like it's straight out of Miami Vice.
Cons
Con No clearly defined missions
The objective of the game is to ultimately reach the center of the galaxy. However, the player is completely free and unguided from the beginning. You figure it out for yourself as you start mining, crafting and upgrading your ship and gear. This game doesn't have a big story to tell.
Con Expensive
No Man's Sky is a pretty big production for an indie game as the team of devs and artists consisted of 14 people in the later stages of development. The game stands out above most indie games in size, features, technology and graphics. Along with the amount of enthusiasm from the gaming community, this has allowed the studio to set the launch price at $60 (or €60).
Con In-game time management could have been handled a bit better
Five minutes in-game are equivalent to a couple of real-world seconds. This makes time go awfully quickly in Beat Cop. The idea is that time needs to go quickly in order for the player to strategize and think hard about which choices they will make during a single day. This fact is further emphasized by NPCs repeating again and again that you will not be able to complete all of your tasks. The problem is that it's perfectly possible to complete all given tasks in even such a small timeframe.
You have a daily minimum number of tickets you have to write, if you reach double of your daily quota the game will reward you for that. But because in-game time management is poor, it's quite easy to even quadruple your daily quota which seems to not have been predicted by the game creators since the game gives no rewards whatsoever for reaching more than double your ticket quota.