Game Book Review: Freeway Warrior #1 - Highway Holocaust (1988, Joe Dever)

in #books5 years ago (edited)

America, 2020 A.D. Eight years ago the terrorist agents of H.A.V.O.C. triggered a nuclear nightmare that devastated the northern hemisphere. A few lucky survivors escaped the radioactive aftermath in underground colonies, waiting for the day they could rebuild their shattered world. That day has come. . .but the real battle for survival has just begun.

You are Cal Phoenix, the Freeway Warrior, champion and protector of Dallas Colony One. A murderous gang of H.A.V.O.C. clansmen, led by the psychotic Mad Dog Michigan, are bent on destroying your fragile colony as it crosses the wastelands of Texas on a life-or-death exodus to the California coast. These ruthless bikers are a formidable enemy: armed, cunning, and extremely dangerous, capable of launching a lightning raid at any time, day or night.

You will need all your strength and skill to defend your people, outwit the enemy, and reach your destination intact.


If you didn't grow up in the 80's, then you may have no idea what I'm talking about when I say, "Choose Your Own Adventure". If you don't, that's totally fine because you're about to experience something they don't much do in the publishing world any longer, although Netflix just launched a video-themed version of it last month with Black Mirror: Bandersnatch. If you've watched/played Bandersnatch, or spoken to anyone who has, or you're familiar with the tradtionally-Japanese genre of games known as "Visual Novels", then you already understand the concept.

For those not so fortunate to have either grown up in the 80's or have a Netflix account today, Joe Dever's Freeway Warrior is a role-playing adventure series where you, the reader, get to dictate the plot progression. Today we'd call such a work a piece of "interactive fiction", but back then we just called them game books. Unlike the Choose Your Own Adventure books which limited the interactivity to picking from one of several outcomes, a game book utilized this framework but also included a small set of rules that turned the book into a stripped-down version of a game like Car Wars or Dungeons & Dragons. In a game book, you not only decided what your character did under different circumstances, but you could also get into fights, attempt daring feats of heroism (or stupidity), and both gain or lose weapons and equipment as the story progressed. You had stats, determined randomly by rolling dice or picking numbers from a table, which could improve or drop over a session, which determined how much damage you could take, how tough you were in a fight, and sometimes more beyond that.

In this review, I'm looking at book one of four in the Freeway Warrior series: Highway Holocaust.


In case the cover illustration wasn't obvious enough, the Freeway Warrior series takes the ideas set forth in films like The Road Warrior or Fist of the North Star: a post-apocalyptic future where food, water, and fuel are all at a premium, human life is cheap, and brutal gangs control and enslave much of the normal populace. Into this hellish world arrives a savior whose wits, skills, and ability to commit ridiculous amounts of violence may be just what it takes to break out of the wasteland.

On the other hand, his stupidity, curiosity, and lack of luck may also wind up getting said savior killed. Nobody ever said the world was a nice place, after all. In Freeway Warrior, this savior of humanity is Cal Phoenix, a young man who survived the nuclear nightmare by virtue of being deep underground in an oil shale mine when the bombs started falling, and spent the last eight years training with his aunt and uncle to survive the world above.

Having helped establish Dallas Colony One, a small outpost of kind-hearted folk just trying to Fallout their way through the world, one day at a time, Cal is now called on to saddle up and ride with the convoy as they journey from Texas to California through some of the toughest terrain in North America. Whether or not they get there, and what happens if they do, is dictated entirely by the reader. With a huge variety of choices and decisions, as well as plenty of skill- and luck-based challenges to overcome, every read is an opportunity to experience a new adventure. Surviving Warriors get to boost their base skills, making subsequent books in the series slightly easier, but all four stories are independently-written, and sequels include catch-up text in the beginning to make sure everybody's on the same page (no pun intended).

With that out of the way, let's take a look at what Freeway Warrior does, how to play it, and where you can go to experience your own highway holocausts online for free!


Early game books, like the Fighting Fantasy series, offered relatively simple rules for character creation and play, with minimal stats to keep track of and very few limits on the sorts of gear you could take along. Joe Dever, on the other hand, likes his game books a little beefier on rules, and Freeway Warrior is no exception.

Aspiring warriors share similar beginnings to other game book protagonists, with every incarnation of Cal Phoenix sharing a base pool of stats starting with Close Combat Skill and Endurance. CCS determines how well you fight with your bare hands, can be bolstered by weapons like knives and clubs, can be reduced by injury or circumstances where you cannot devote your full attention to the battle, and is ranked on a base scale from 10 to 19. Endurance is a measure of how tough you are, is generally reduced somewhat as the result of getting into fights or lacking sufficient supplies, can be restored through periods of rest or the use of your first aid kit, and is ranked on a base scale from 20 to 29. Your enemies in Freeway Warrior share these same stats; combat concludes when one fighter is reduced to 0 or fewer Endurance. If that fighter is you, then it's time to roll up another Cal Phoenix and start over.

Beyond Close Combat Skill and Endurance though are the five skills Cal has developed over his years: Driving, Shooting, Field Craft, Stealth, and Perception. Driving determines how adept Cal is behind the wheel; Shooting is skill with guns; Field Craft is all about survival in the wilderness; Stealth lets Cal creep around without alerting people; Perception is his ability to notice things that are out of the ordinary. Cal starts the adventure with a base rank of 3 in every skill, but you get a further four points to allocate to those skills as you see fit so you can customize him to your liking. There's no limit on how these points can be spent: you can increase four of the abilities by one point each, bump one skill up by four, or do any combination between.

Most of the time these skills won't change by much, but Stealth probably will. Lugging around a bunch of gear is both heavy and noisy, so the more items stuffed in Cal's backpack, and the more guns strapped to his hip and/or back, cause penalties to his Stealth skill. This forces players to walk a fine line between playing an incarnation of Cal who takes only the bare necessities and has the best chance to stay out of trouble, or one who loads himself down with everything that could possibly be useful but will virtually guarantee he gets spotted by every bad guy in the wastelands. What's worse, Dever went out of his way to write a story where all five of these skills are put to the test multiple times throughout the narrative, so there's no one skill it's better to 'dump' than another. It all comes down to personal preference.

After that, we're still not done though as we have to select our gear for the starting trip, and we can pick from up to four items on a list of nine options. Cal's backpack can hold up to ten items, but if he's carrying between 4 and 6 items, he loses 1 Stealth, between 7 and 9 items costs him 2 Stealth, and a full load of 10 reduces Stealth by 3. In an additionally evil plot by Dever, Cal has to eat and drink throughout his journey. He starts with no food unless he picks the option of Three Meals as one of his four equipment choices...but each meal counts as a separate backpack space, so taking them means no only are we using up valuable backpack space but also selecting anything else at all will penalize our Stealth right from the start. It's also impossible to know what will come in handy and what will be useless for the adventure. A Flexible Saw or a Geiger Counter sure sound helpful, but if we're never in a situation where we have to assess a radiation level or cut through something wooden, they're just taking up space. On the other hand, items like the Binoculars and C.B. Radio have more broadly-useful applications, but taking them may mean lacking some tool to overcome a specific puzzle later on.

Maybe I should call him "Joe Devious" instead...

In addition to this starting gear, we also get:

  • a first aid kit with between 3 and 12 uses
  • a canteen with 2 pints of fresh water
  • an ammo pouch for carrying extra bullets
  • a hunting knife (+2 to Close Combat Skill)
  • a firearm of his choice (pistol, machine pistol, shotgun, or rifle)

Picking the gun is the last major decision you make at character creation, and it's one of the most important. Each gun fires a different type of ammo (except the pistol and machine pistol, which share 9mm bullets), comes with a different amount of starting ammo, may consume a different amount of ammo per shot, and is obviously useful in different circumstances. Shotguns and machine pistols are great for close-combat situations, a rifle is perfect for sniping, and the standard pistol is an ordinary all-around weapon. You get enough ammo at the start for eight pistol shots, five machine pistol bursts, four shotgun blasts, or four rifle shots, so no matter what you need to make every shot count.

There are actually some interesting strategies you can try with these guns, and one of my favorite when I was younger was to select the machine pistol as my starting gun because it comes with 30 rounds of 9mm ammo (although it cchews through six bullets each time you fire it). Because it shares ammo with the pistol though, you come out way ahead on ammo if you ditch it as soon as you find one, since a pistol only gives you 8 starting rounds. This means you can fire your machine pistol four times before you find a standard pistol and you'll still be better off than you would be if you just opted for the pistol at the beginning (assuming you used it the same number of times as the machine pistol, you'd have 4 rounds of pistol ammo left vs. 6 rounds with the machine pistol). This is kind of a gamble though--if you don't find a pistol, or you find other guns in the meantime, you're crowding up your ammo pouch which, just like your backpack, has a limited capacity.

So many choices, and we haven't even gotten on the road yet! What have you done to us, Joe?


After creating your character and picking your gear (either with an eye to what could be more useful, or on the basis of ESP), it's time to get into the adventure. It doesn't take long for trouble to kick up, as a colony member named Long Jake goes on a hunt for gear, finds a survivor, and gets himself ambushed by a few scouts from a biker gang. You saddle up and ride to the rescue, killing an exceptionally nasty punk, only to discover your buddy bleeding out on the floor. The girl, Kate, is still alive, but she brings grim news: the man you killed was the brother of a powerful warlord known as Mad Dog Michigan, and when the scout who escaped in the firefight gets back to him to make a report, Mad Dog will be hell-bent on settling the score and won't hesitate to bring the wrath of his entire gang down on Dallas Colony One's head.

Returning to the convoy with Kate, along with the double-whammy of bad news concerning Long Jake's death and Mad Dog's pending vendetta, the group decides speed is of the utmost importance and starts heading east. From here on out, there are any number of ways things can go, with the reader able to investigate or bypass areas of their choosing, always keeping in mind that stopping to search means less distance between the convoy and Mad Dog's raiders (not to mention opportunities for fights to break out), but not stopping could mean overlooking critical supplies or useful gear that could be vital to the convoy's success later on.

The way I played these books back in the day was with an unwillingness to leave any stone unturned, so my various incarnations of Cal often came to bad ends due to being brutalized by packs of rabid dogs or leather-clad rejects from The Village People. Despite this, how could you not want to check out a strange, repeating radio broadcast, or the remains of a former Air Force base? Dever places these locations in his book where they would be encountered in the real world, which gives the story an extra flavor of realism: the highways, cities, towns, and other places all exist on the map. In fact, the book includes a two-page map of a small section of Texas just inside the front cover so you can track your movement as you progress through the story. It's a nice touch, especially considering Dever hailed from England, so Texas was hardly his own back yard.

Dever's nationality and Berkley's lackadaisical approach to re-printing the books for a US audience, however, can lead to some confusion, especially for younger readers. It took me a bit to realize the 'Solar Torch' I could pick from the equipment list was really a 'flashlight', for example. Several other anachronisms pertaining to spelling and usage also appear in the text: 'tyre' vs. 'tire', 'de-activates' vs. 'deactivates', and so forth, although these aren't that big of a deal. References to the U.S.S.R. are also outdated, considering that body dissolved in 1991, but since these books were originally published in the late 80's, this is understandable. Postulating the future is always difficult for any writer, so I can't fault Dever assuming the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics would stand at least until 2020.


All in all, Freeway Warrior does a fine job emulating the feel of a struggle for survival in post-nuke America, while making sure it's relatively kid-friendly. There's violence, of course, and the gangs are suitably brutal, but Dever never glamorizes the violence and bloodshed. Within the narrative, stuff happens to people but it isn't lingered on longer than necessary, and never to the point of gratuitousness. These things are supposed to be fun, after all, not traumatizing. That's the good news.

The bad news is, these mothers have been out of print for thirty years and physical copies are stupid expensive on the second-hand market, with book one alone running damn near $40, and the fourth and final book selling for upwards for $75. Man, does that ever suck. Wouldn't it be nice if there was a way to, you know, be able to play this and other game books from the same era without having to choose between them and two weeks' worth of groceries?

You need to know about Project Aon.

Project Aon, which is available in English, Spanish, and Italian at the time of this writing, is an online resource for Joe Dever's game books. Included in their archive, and offered for free with Joe's blessing, are all four books in the Freeway Warrior series. These titles can be played online through your web browser, or downloaded for offline usage. If that was all there was to it, that would be amazing in and of itself, but Dever's generosity didn't stop there. Also available in Project Aon's archives are twenty classic Lone Wolf game books, seven 'New Order' Lone Wolf books, all four Combat Heroes titles, and all four World of Lone Wolf books featuring Grey Star the Wizard.

Along with all these goodies are an abundance of maps, short stories, novelizations, printable action charts and character sheets, companion books, and programs like Statskeeper which computerize record keeping for game books. So if you grew up reading Joe Dever's work, or you're hearing about it for the first time here on Steemit and think it's something you want to try for yourself, saddle up to Project Aon with some virtual dice, a couple pieces of paper, and your imagination.

I never found all four books in the Freeway Warrior series when I was a kid (even today, I only have books 1 and 4), so my incarnation of Cal Phoenix never made the entire journey from McKinney to the coast. Maybe your incarnation will do better? The only way to find out is to give it a try for yourself!


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