It’s sad but true; PC releases of exceptional quality have slowed dramatically in recent times. With nothing new to play, gamers go through their cupboards to pull out dusty old games, reliving the glory days of old. Days when PC games were shipped in boxes the size of a small house, included an encyclopaedia to explain their controls, and required a programming degree to install.

There are problems in doing this though. Your precious decade-old memories may become nothing more than bitter dust when you realise the game you obsessed about is actually quite terrible by today's standards.

Enter our new feature – Retro Roadtest, where we look at beloved games of ye olden days, to investigate just how well they've aged. We’ll also test how easy it is to get these cobweb infested lines of code to run on today’s supercomputers. To get the ball rolling, we're looking at Heroes of Might and Magic II – Gold, developed by the now defunct New World Computing.

The Heroes of Might and Magic series is unique in many ways. It successfully combined turn-based strategy, role-playing and economic management, making the game incredibly addictive, rewarding and deep, allowing players to achieve their goals in many different ways.

It picks up where the first in the series left off, with the story concerning itself about the succession of the throne – two brothers with differing ideals and claims to the throne, enlist a number of generals to wage war against one another, with the throne being the ultimate prize. Thus creating the opportunity for players to participate in two different campaigns (one “good”, the other “evil”), and allows many possible outcomes across the individual missions that make up the campaign.

Gameplay consists of controlling heroes, exploring fairly large game environments, managing castles and towns, and of course, engaging in combat. You’ll engage both rival generals and heroes, and also against neutral monsters found in the landscape. These guys are normally guarding precious resources such as gold mines, foundries, or artefacts, which can confer a buff to the army a hero controls, or grant additional resources to strengthen one's army.

While the gameplay still retains all the highly addictive formula which I loved over a decade ago, sadly there are many ways in which the game isn't up to scratch by today's standards. In particular, the voice acting, , is of a fairly low quality, as if the actor responsible was being paid by the minute, with the studio prodding them with sticks, trying to get them to read their lines as quickly as possible. This is redeemed however by the game's background music, which is still as epic as ever, with several unique tracks for individual races that really compliment the game's mood.

From a visual standpoint, the game still looks quite stylish, but it hasn't aged all that well. Thankfully the gameplay makes up for that – Heroes of Might and Magic II is still as addictive as it was when first released.

As a whole then, our recent revival of the game proved that the game is still every bit as good as it was before. The plot is enough to keep you interested, and the epic battles still feel fun, if only for the way in which your 40 Bone Dragons kill a bunch of 470 Peasants simply by flying over to them and giving them a quick nip on the neck. While the battle animations are very simple, the game is still very satisfying, and continues to be an enchanting experience.

Before you rush to your shed, cupboard, or wardrobe (or wherever you keep your old games) – it’s important to note that you'll probably need to do some tinkering with DosBox in order to get the game running on XP, Vista, or Windows 7 – if you're simply too lazy to do that, you can always grab the game from gog.com and it will run on Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7 with no problems. The gog.com release includes Heroes of Might and Magic II, and its expansion pack, The Price of Loyalty, both of which should provide many, many hours of enjoyable gameplay.