Prince of Qin

The Good
In it's heart, Prince of Qin is a clone of Blizzard's Diablo. If you liked Diablo's gameplay, chances are you'll get along quite well with Prince of Qin as well. The setting PoQ takes place in isn't as over-used as other settings that spring to mind (i.e. Tolkien-like fantasy), the strange mixture of actual Chinese history and far-eastern mythology is rather refreshing.

The game doesn't try to please the hunter-and-gatherer in each of us as much as the Diablo games do with their huge variety of items with different prefixes, suffixes etc. There's a smaller selection of item statistics, and what you can find or buy is usually rather generic. However, like with the setting, the developers decided to take a path that hasn't been frequented as much when it comes to arms and armor. Using certain blueprints, the player can manufacture items out of raw materials he ran across. These materials can be found literally everywhere, the maps are scattered with "hot-spots" which will provide a piece of wood, some ore or something along these lines. Usually, exceptional raw materials will be found after battles of some sort, but occasionally, a great piece of rare wood will fall out of an ordinary tree.

In terms of story, the game isn't as minimalistic as Diablo, it's more along the lines of Divine Divinity. You also have a real party, not just henchmen like in D2.

The Bad
However, unusual setting nice and good, presentation is lacking, to say the least. Conversations with locals often feel like the texts were run through altavista's Babelfish or something. At times, this actually adds to the atmosphere, like when a towns-person decides to teach you the virtues of helping the weak or some such. On other occasions, it's involuntarily funny, and sometimes it's even hard to understand, so I figure it might disturb some players, which is why I list it here under the bad parts.

Graphics are unspectacular. Not ugly or something, but for a 2002 game, pure 2D graphics like in the first Diablo are simply showing their age.

Finally, the balancing is a bit lacking at times, especially in the late game. It's nothing too serious, but it can lead to some amount of frustration.

The Bottom Line
If you're looking for some Diablo-like gameplay in a non-standard setting, you should give this game a chance.
I picked it up in the bargain bin, never having heard of it before, and it was certainly worth the amount I paid for it, probably more.
PoQ recently got a semi-sequel called "Seal of Evil", which is actually inferior to it in many ways, but I'll not go into details here, after all this is a review for PoQ.

So, if you can stand it's dated graphics and translation issues, go ahead and grab it. If you're expecting a game to make your latest graphics card work for it's money, stay clear.