Battlecars was an highly ambitious attempt to port a tabletop car duelling game to a home computer format from developers SLUG, who'd earlier given us Apocalypse and later went on to do Talisman.
The idea is that you create your own fighting vehicle using an editor written by Julian Gollop who'd later go on to great success in his own right. You've a choice of different chassis, engines, armour, etc. and can arm up with weapons from lowly machine guns to high powered lasers. Additional passive weapons include things like mines, smoke and oil which can be dropped into the path of unsuspecting opponents. Your cash is limited, so it's important to design a balanced vehicle, or at least one with strengths you can play to.
You then pick a choice of three venues. There's a racetrack, the open arena of the Autodrome, or the mean streets of Slug City. Ideally it's a two player game, although the computer can sub for the second player if you just want a straight race or a duel in the Autodrome. It's not a terribly sophisticated opponent, however, and can easily be outmanoeuvred.
Despite the grand concept, the game rather suffers from some unsophisticated programming. There's on a small window on the action for each player, the scrolling is slow and jerky, and the controls are bizarre. Each player has an entire half of the keyboard on which only a single key can be pressed at a time; if this seems like a bit of a nightmare to get to grips with, you're not wrong. I can only presume that it was done this way to avoid the inevitable matrix clashes when more than two keys are pressed at once.
Combine this with a sluggish multi-load, and you've got a rather difficult game to get into. However, it can still be an ultimately rewarding one, especially if you can find someone else prepared to give it a go with you.
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