The Faces of Evil breaks all the laws of game design by being incredibly simple, but ruthlessly difficult.
Giving Zelda games cartoon cutscenes doesn't sound like a bad idea, but the worst thing they can possibly do with them is allow a Russian animation company with a limited grasp of English to write them. The cutscenes are atrotious. Why does everybody look so crazy and monster-like? The voice acting is laughable. Not only does King Harknian sound like a total drunk, but Link's voice cracks, Zelda sounds like she's 10 years old, and Ganon sounds like he's been smoking since he was 7.
There are 2 buttons for controls. One button makes Link stab his sword and the other button does everything else; open the menu, open doors, etc. I often times entered a door when I wanted to bring up the menu. It's incredibly annoying. This wouldn't seem like a huge problem, but the doors are gigantic! You'd think they would just assign the menu to a third button, or something, considering you press up to jump. They could just assign the menu to that whole third button they aren't using.
The game is a platformer, so it's about killing enemies and jumping across platforms. The problem is that Link can't jump for his life and every enemy either takes about 15 hits to kill. Sometimes, enemies are too low to hit. Even if you duck and stab, they still can't be hit. Often times, enemies will hit you before you can hit them. There isn't any recovery time, so there isn't that comforting moment of invincibility from the other Zelda games. If you accidentally land on an enemy, they can drain your life in seconds. It's irritating and this is a platformer. There's a lot more fighting unkillable enemies than actual platforming.
The graphics seem kind of nice. The environments are colorful and the sprites are crisp, but it's hard to tell if you can land on something or not. Many times, I accidentally jumped on something and passed right through, thinking, "Wow. They didn't even program that to be solid." But then I learned, you aren't supposed to be able to jump on that anyway. At one point, you have to ride a raft through a swamp filled with flying enemies. At one point, I jumped, and I landed on an alligator and I couldn't jump back on the raft, because by that point, the raft was out of jumping distance.
One thing I always thought was weird is that you have to stab people to talk to them. It's irritating when you're fighting off an enemy swarm and somebody is nearby. It's especially annoying when you're buying things by stabbing them, then the shopkeeper comes over to you and won't go away, so you keep talking to him.
The worst thing about this game is the need for items. I ran out of Rope, Bombs, and Lantern Oil a lot because you can only buy them from shops and it's always in town, so if you run out of items, it's a long way back to town. There are also a lot of items that require you to have Rupees to use them. Rupees are a lot more important than the game lets on. You are constantly returning to town to buy things, and the important items like the Wing Helmet can't be used because you don't have enough Rupees to use them.
Gameplay: 0.5
Graphics: 5
Story: 3
Sound: 2
Replay Value: 0
Fun Level: 0
Final Score: 2.1
Pros and Cons:
+Colorful Environments
-Terrible Voice Acting
-Atrotious gameplay
-Akward Controls
-Bad Animation
-The Unessacarily High Need For Rupees