The story follows Prince Fu Su, who in 200 B.C. was ordered to commit suicide by his father, the emperor. In the game, the prince instead travels to Xianyang to make sure his father did indeed send the edict. On arriving, he finds a royal conspiracy. Of course, this means the prince has to travel incognito, which doesn’t stop half the population from easily recognizing him when it’s convenient to the plot.

The game is billed as an “action RPG,” which is accurate. You don’t get to build a character, other than assigning attribute points and skills at level-up. Skills vary from character to character – the game allows for a party of four, who can be recruited or dismissed at the player’s whim – and range from combat styles to more exotic skills like healing, spells and animal control.

The POQ world is sparsely populated; what should be teeming city streets full of sound and motion, especially in the Qin capital of Xianyang, are deserted. Most of the few wandering NPCs spout platitudes that – and I hate to say this, but it’s true – seem cribbed entirely from fortune cookies. The prince does meet some NPCs who will interact, but only to ask or answer a question. My theory is that these interactions are meant to show the prince learning from the vox populi what it means to be a successful ruler.

The quest system is flawed but acceptable. One thing I find interesting is that you get one shot at most of the quests, usually the ones that require convincing another person of something. Say the wrong thing, and the person in question will clam up. Quest over. (Sort of – it remains in the outstanding quests area, but can never be completed.) I kinda like this, in that players are forced to think before speaking. The biggest flaw is that quests are given with few details: “Find this/do that,” but usually without even a hint at where the object can be found.

Combat is handled well. As in the Diablo games, it’s point and click. What’s different is that you can assign different actions to the right and left hands, controlled respectively by the right and left mouse buttons. Plus, you can assign up to four skills for each hand, toggled by the keyboard. We recommend you do so before combat, because it’s hard to really strategize during the heat of battle.

Graphics aren’t much of an improvement over the Black Isle and BioWare titles that influenced Object Software. Enemies are particularly bad, in that more powerful enemies are just shown in different colors than their weaker brethren. Size also plays a part; more powerful creature enemies are larger than normal. Literally – the graphic for said creature is just enlarged and stretched, making for some really blocky bad guys.

Sound is great; it’s nice to hear a change from the usual medieval RPG tunes, and POQ delivers with its Far East music.

I think Object is on the right path here – more developers could do worse to study the paths blazed by BioWare and Black Isle. Chinese tradition is rich enough to give medieval RPGs a run for their money, to be sure. I look forward to Object’s next foray into action RPGs. In the meantime, Prince of Qin does a fairly good job of getting their foot in the door.