Trials of Battle was a game in which you were abducted to represent humans in an intergalactic arena.
You are put in a vehicle and combat other identical vehicle. Winning gains you points and credits which you use to upgrade your vehicle or change to a different one. To be successful you need to use tactics as wells as be good at simple first-person-shooter.
You need to balance what to buy and where to go in the arena (which of course changes from battle to battle).
There are 3 different vehicles. The first one is a lightweight groundbased one, the second one available is a flying vehicle and the third is a heavily armored groundbased one.
You need to decide what to focus on: armor, speed, laser, mines, rockets among others. It gets more complicated when they add radar, radar jammers, dead radar zones.

I really liked the game and it was the first shooter game we had. It only worked on OS/2.