AutoDuel

The Good
Building your own vehicles was by far the best part of the game. Almost every weapon was useful, and you had to make a lot of tough decisions to balance the offensive, defensive, and cargo capacity of your vehicle.

The Bad
The plot of the game was silly and cliched.

The Bottom Line
Autoduel was one of the first games of its time to combine arcade action with role-playing, and it worked very well. You not only got to build up your cars, but you got to build up your driver as well and there were a lot of ways to win the prestige you needed to ultimately win the game. Whether you chose to be a delivery boy or master of the arena or both, the game was chock full of action and fun.

The Good
The game world is very large and has a lot of different cities. The roads between the cities branch and you need to learn the best routes unless you are prepared to drive round in circles.

The gameplay is completely open ended and you can play the game any way you like. There are courier missions to transport goods between towns, you can fight in the arena, or drive out and find battles on the highways to increase your stats and money. You can even just play poker in Atlantic city to raise your money and prestige if you prefer.

There are countless options for building a car with no ultimate set-up. Depending on how you want to play you can have a heavily armoured tank or something much faster and smaller. You can have your big weapons on the front of the car for attacking head on, at the rear for taking out pursuers or in any other direction you wish. You can own up to 8 cars and store them in garages, so you can even have a car for every occasion.

The Bad
What Origin achieved with one floppy disk on an Apple II is impressive, but the technology still limits the game. There is no real variety in missions and the graphics on the roads are very basic and quite slow. There is hardly any traffic for the standard missions, usually just a couple of cars between cities.

The drives between cities can get dull, especially if you go the long way round. You can be following the roads along for 5-10 minutes with nothing to do.

There are very few plot missions, and they don't really give the game any storyline. The game is more about building your car and it feels as though the plot missions were added just to give you a way to win.

The Bottom Line
This is a good game for 1985 and if anyone made a modern remake, I'd go out and buy it. It's a cross between Grand Theft Auto and Privateer, years before either of them came out. Unfortunately the Apple II wasn't really capable of doing justice to the idea and the game is a bit limited as a result.

The Good
Autoduel was one of the first role-playing/action hybrids for the Apple II. Building your vehicles was very engaging and challenging. Do you add weapons to your courier car, or do you leave it stripped so you can haul that extra cargo? Do you use the laser which had a huge number of shots but drains your battery or the Recoiless Rifle which is very heavy and has limited ammo? Bigger engine or more armor? And so on....

It is fortunate that the game allowed you to have several vehicles, because it let you explore all the ways of playing. Autoduel had a storyline and a cursory plot, but the real point of its non-linear play was to complete deliveries and to see just how many vehicles you could destroy, salvage, or escape (depending on your playing style).

Driving from town to town was fun even if there wasn't much traffic (that is, enemies). You always had to be careful to not get lost or you would have to abandon your vehicle and walk to town, defenseless against any onslaught. Some of the roads, particularly the route you had to take to finish the final delivery quest, were particularly long and convoluted.

Finally, despite all of the weapons and armor you could put on your vehicle, driving your vehicle and firing/switching weapons was straightforward. It was easy to learn the basics, but once a few enemies were chasing you and you had to rely strictly on your tires and driving skill, well, that separated the Speedster from the roadkill.

The Bad
The only thing not to like about Autoduel was the lack of a real plot. Sure there was a quest once you had built up enough prestige, but it would have been fun to have more types of missions such as bounties on enemy drivers.

The Bottom Line
Autoduel is a fast-paced action/RPG that puts you in the driver's seat of a fast killing machine. You design and build your own vehicles to earn money and prestige fighting in the arena, delivering valuable packages, or just salvaging what's left of the bandits you left in a melted, smoking heap on the open road.