When comparing Human Resource Machine vs Beat Cop, the Slant community recommends Human Resource Machine for most people. In the question“What are the best Puzzle games on Steam?” Human Resource Machine is ranked 19th while Beat Cop is ranked 22nd. The most important reason people chose Human Resource Machine is:
The game's replay value increases as solutions can be beat in two metrics: Commands and Steps.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Can optimize your solutions
The game's replay value increases as solutions can be beat in two metrics: Commands and Steps.
Pro Good graphics and sound
The game is very reminiscent of World of Goo's graphics, being very consistent and sort of cartoony, and all sounds are synthesized.
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 Short for price (especially for people looking to learn)
This game contains about 5 hours of content for many players, and is composed of 3 "chapters" of about 11 levels each. Most of that is taken up by tutorials. Each chapter 'dives in' a little bit into a topic. But if you're looking to learn programming it'll likely be too short. It also has many mini levels where it shows a little topic, but those are not explored that much (one of the worst moments with it is when it asks you to "use a friendly search box" as a serious recommendation).
(Note: This game actually is appearing in a Humble Bundle for $1 by the time of writing.)
Con Lack of optimization accuracy
One pro about games like this are the fact that you can optimize your solutions. But the marked "Best" solution is almost always inaccurate. Some levels are tens of blocks and hundreds of steps away. You'll have to go to other places to challenge yourself properly.
Con Levels are unoriginal
Related to the game's story not doing much, the gameplay also does not integrate itself with any cool story events that may happen, as they don't happen. You don't lose abilities, nothing gets 'screwed up', and the game doesn't last long enough to be able to explore the game's concept in depth. What this means is that the levels are more by-the-book as if they were programming puzzles in a book, and if you've played many games of this similar genre you've already seen about 80% of the puzzles in the game, in which most of the remaining ones are early tutorial puzzles.
Con Frustrating interface at later levels
The game does not show you every part of your program at once. At later stages, even about 20 instructions will require scrolling to reach parts of your program. Even with about 30, it quickly becomes tedious to move around your instructions as you will either have to wait for scrolling or spam the scroll wheel. Many of your solutions will also be using one of the 'blue' commands, which has two arrows, so you cannot just delete the key instruction and add a copy to where you want it to go.
Con Awful debugging
The game's debugging features consist of a step forward button, a step back button, and fast forwarding (up to about 4x). However, these are not enough. In many levels you could find yourself noticing your program is stuck in a loop, then having to repeatedly click "Step back" dozens of times just to find the key moment, which is even worse if you were fully fast forwarding. In later levels, where solutions start taking some more time, it might take minutes to find the key moment in your program that failed to work, just to wait more to figure out if the change you made was enough to get it to work.
Con Story is disappointing
The game's story does not progress very far. With a premise as interesting as tying into the "machines taking over jobs and humans", you'd expect gameplay and levels as unique. But the game plays as stock as a programming game can get, even just on the story standpoint. Many details are shown around the game, but the game doesn't go deep for anything involving it.
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.