Little Deviants serves its purpose as a tech demo, but falls considerably short of an actual game.
Meet the Little Deviants. This ragtag group of limbless blobs were cruising through space when the Botz cut their trip short and shot up their glorious spaceship. Crash landing on a planet occupied with Whomans, their ship smashed into 30 pieces, scattering themselves all over the Whomans' planet. You must help each and every little deviant recover their ship pieces and assemble them together so that they can return home.
Think Rayman Raving Rabbids, although not as fun and not as funny, and you've got Little Deviants. The game's a mixture of 30 mini games spread across six different regions. Each game has you controlling the deviants in different ways. Rolling Pastures will have you touching the rear touch pad to deform the landscape and roll your blob across the level, while Corridor Calamity will have you tilting the Vita like a labyrinth. Rotten Rumble has you slingshotting the deviant across a fighting ring by "pinching" the touch screen and rear touch pad. Botz Invasion is one of the more fun games and, it involves you using the camera and moving the Vita around to find nasty Botz that are trying to shoot down your teammates.
One of the mini game types is Death Speeder, and it has you tilting the Vita like a steering wheel to control a rocket while avoiding objects and staying ahead of a robotic whale. The motion sensing of the Vita is actually extremely sensitive, so you need nerves of steel to perform well. Other games, like Bouncer Trouncer, actually have you holding the Vita vertically to change the orientation of the playing area. For the most part, all these different mini games work very well, but there's one mini game that is completely broken. Smashing Tune requires you to sing or hum into the microphone to generate low, high and mid-range notes. Sadly, this game has a hard time recognizing your pitch, and you'll have to continuously change octaves and hope for the best to hit the right note.
Many of these mini games are quite short, some of them ending in just a few minutes. Since there are only 30 mini games in total, you can blow through the entire game in just one sitting. It's not until the final region that real creative use is seen in the mini games and what they demand from the Vita's control interface. It does have some appeal for gamers who like to chase high scores, as each mini game has a bronze, silver and gold ranking. There are stars spread throughout the games that makes high scores possible, and there are also kittens called Moggers to unlock as well. The Moggers don't serve any purpose, however, so you may not feel the compulsion to go after them. You can also challenge your PSN friends to break a high score you just earned as well as gift items via "near".
The real crime of Little Deviants aside from its lack of content is that these cute and quirky characters don't have much personality to them. There are different characters such as the milquetoast Goopher, the flaming Pyrus, the frozen Frostal and the radioactive Nucleor but aside from looking different, they don't feel any different as they're all used in the same type of mini games. Even just giving them basic profile information or even simple story lines would have helped to establish some kind of dimension about them.
Visually, Little Deviants is an impressive game. Everything about the graphics from the rendering to the colors is sharp and crisp. The animations are pretty smooth, and seeing the ground being deformed during one of the Rolling Pastures stages is a cool effect. It's also rather neat to see graphics overlaid on your camera's viewfinder. The art design of pretty much everything from environments to characters is chock full of charm. It's just a shame that the game can't match its graphics with the same level of personality.
The audio also compliments the visuals very well. The soundtrack is jovial and light-hearted and the mumblings of the Little Deviants and Whomans are cute. Sound effects are kept simple, but they fit very well for the nature of this kind of game. There are boings of deviants bouncing on trampolines and wind rushing by when you're going through the skydiving stage.
If you were one of the lucky ones to score a Vita First Edition Bundle, Little Deviants makes for a decent pack-in. It's a great time killer when you have a few minutes here and there. It also demonstrates very well the vast array of control methods the Vita has at its disposal and being able to send out high score challenges will keep you and your friends returning if only for a few minutes at a time. At a standalone cost of 30 dollars, the value isn't quite there, but if you can buy it for cheaper, it might be worth checking out if you like mini game compilations.