Reviews

After the rave reviews that greeted Wheelie and Skool Daze, this helicopter-based 3D shooter got something of a lukewarm reception for Microsphere. The plot is fairly simple; in an Orwellian future, a group of drones called the watchers are making everyone's life a misery by enforcing all manner of petty laws and it's your job to hunt them down and take them out.

Graphically, it's pretty good. Perhaps coming after Gyron, the combination of towers and balls in 3D wasn't going to wow anyone as much, but it's every bit as slick as its predecessor and gives a fair impression of speed into the bargain.

The one little fly in the ointment is that it's all to easy to decorate your windshield with some ugly cracks. Flying into a watcher will do it, bumping into the ground too hard will too, and crashing into one of the buildings will sometimes add several. Even if you lose a life, and you inevitably will quite often when you're starting out, the cracks persist until you either finish the level or end the game.

That said, once you get the hang of it, and keep crashing down to a minimum, it's a fun game of hunt and shoot. At the lowest levels the watchers are quite pedestrian and you can easily stalk up behind them to take them out. Once you've got into the game a bit though, they're zipping around as fast as you can fly and your reactions will be sorely tested. Your helicopter also has limited fuel that you'll need to replenish by landing at one of five stations. There's no map, just a flashing indicator, so you've got to pick them out by the patterns of the buildings around them.

On the whole, I think this is an underrated game; it might be nowhere near as innovative and intricate as Skool Daze, but it's still every bit as original an idea and great fun to play too.

A bad cross between an arcade and a flight simulator which manages to be both bland and frustrating.

For some reason it seems to be very highly rated by WOS users - to me it's a severe case of overrating.

Sky Ranger by Microsphere. Not a very known (at least for me) game from the publishers of classics Skool Daze and Back to Skool. It is how Combat Lynx should have been: a chopper easy to control, sensible number of key controls, ... more an arcade than a simulator, an interesting game to play.

The Watchers are dronecops going mad and are hovering all over the city doing bad things. So you, with your vector graphics jecopter must fly through it and with the help of a radar, spot them and destroy them.
As mr. Alessandro Grussu writes in his review this is a mix between a simulator and a shoot'em up, and at the same it's neither, and it falls in a uncertain limbo. There not hot action, nor very complicated and "realistic" commands and such. It's nice learning to fly among the building and trying to fly over some of them, in the attempt of find the drones. But in the end there's not much going on.
3/5

A competent chopper simulator , but nothing to lose sleep over ! !

2,5 / 5 .

From the maker of the classic Skool Daze and the even better sequel Back to Skool comes a dull and mediocre flight simulator stroke shoot em up that lacks any sort of thrills and enjoyment the aforementioned previous games had. Different kind of game yes but this could have at least had some kind of lasting playability, which it severely lacks.

1984 Microsphere (UK)
by David S. Reidy

If not by one of the Skool Daze games creator, maybe this game would fly discretely on everyone's radar.
The game looks deceptively as a flight simulator but it's not, it's an arcade game as claimed by the publisher, which hints at a flight simulator. You move your jetcopter in a controlled city by former police forces gone rebel called the Watchers, you are the last faithful unit and must regain the city's power. You will use 7 keys, which include, up, down, left, right, fire and speed up/down. It may seem too many keys but they are easy enough to control. You have also a useful green radar which will help identify the enemy forces.

The game is very well designed and even if the city quickly becomes repetitive with buildings looking the same and only distinguished by how high they are, it's still quite impressive for 1984 game. Moving between buildings is quite well done and can be quite tricky if you still don't have the hang for it.
The game as more to it than it appears at first, for instance, from time to time, you have to land in refueling stations and refuel you chopper otherwise say bye bye to your chopper.

Crashing into a building will not only make an impressive rotation downwards towards the ground but also leave a mark of cracked glass on the cockpit, obstructing the view. Enemy fire will have a similar but not so hard effect, making smaller cracks.
And I specially liked the idea of fog coming from the nearby sea obscuring the cockpits vision, initially I thought it was a bug, but the instructions cleared that up.

Initially I didn't like it much, it's obviously outdated, but after persisting for a while waiting for the Watchers to come close and then chase and destroy them it got a lot more interesting and even addictive.

3,5 points