Although a licensed product, Autoduel features a massive difference: while Car Wars was turn-based, Origin's team took some lessons from Midway's 1983 arcade hit Spy Hunter and made the game an arcade-y, top-down real-time driving game that requires fast reflexes and is best played with a joystick.

True to its source material, Autoduel features an incredibly detailed car-building system. You'll choose from various car types (compact, van, pickup, luxury, etc.) and equip it with your choice of chassis, armour, suspension, tyres, weapons and power plant.

This is where the game shines. It's a joy to build your own vehicles, creating a fast car that can outrun enemies and lay mines or buying a large power plant to use laser weapons. There's also a robust locational damage system, as weapons, tyres, armour layers and even the driver have their own hit points. Get shot at a side that has no armour left and you're likely dead.

You can freely drive across the Northeastern US, hunting outlaws (and salvaging their cars), battling in arenas and taking delivery quests. It can get a bit repetitive after a while, but build enough prestige and you'll unlock a final mission for the FBI.

Unfortunately, Autoduel's top-down driving and combat aged badly. Yes, it was great for 1985, but lacks that visceral feedback we have in modern 3D driving games. However, its real flaw is the extreme difficulty. The combat is fairly challenging, but gets frustrating when paired with permadeath – if you die the game erases your save, forcing you to restart from scratch unless you have a very expensive clone of yourself.

If you enjoy such high challenge (or don't mind making manual backups of your save files), then be sure to take Autoduel for a ride. While there are many other vehicular combat games out there, very few can match the complexity of this classic.