When new gaming technology emerges, companies put out games to demonstrate and promote the new tech. Recall Duck Hunt for Nintendo’s light gun and Wii Sports for the Nintendo Wii. The PlayStation Vita’s demo game is Little Deviants. Packaged into the “First Edition” PS Vita releases (an early Vita), Little Deviants comes from Bigbig Studios – a Sony first party studio in the United Kingdom.

Little Deviants is full of mini-games that each focus in on one particular aspect of the PlayStation Vita’s technology – from tilt control to front/back touch to the use of the microphone. It also uses the Vita’s augmented reality features. While the system captures all these aspects well, none of them will blow you away in terms of gameplay or fun.


The featured mini-game in each world is the rear-touch-to-roll game. By placing your finger on the rear touchpad, you essentially “push up” into the world making a previously flat plane into a hill. This forces the Deviant to roll down the hill as you attempt to pick up keys and power-ups on the way to the goal while avoiding botz and dead’uns (aka bad guys). The rear-touch-to-roll sounds interesting in theory, but I did not find it as intuitive as tilt-to-roll controls, such as those found in Mutant Blobs Attack. In fact, playing Little Deviants left me frustrated more often as not.

Sadly, all of the feature sets feel a bit wonky. In one instance, your Deviant jumps out of a plane. With the camera angle above/behind your falling Deviant, you must tilt the Vita to guide (glide) your Deviant through rings. After more than a few failures, I finally realized that holding the Vita parallel to the ground wasn’t dead center. I guess the developers felt you’d hold the Vita at a slight angle or something, but it felt completely unnatural to me.

That is not to say that Little Deviants does not have some positive aspects. My favorite game was in the style of whack-a-mole. This quick recognition game, where doors slide open revealing targets to knock out (botz) or decoys to leave alone (humans and other Deviants), is fast-paced and fun. To make things more difficult, the direction the botz face determines whether you touch the front to knock them out the back or rear touch to knock them out towards you.

Little Deviants can be enjoyable in short bursts, but it really is not worth the money or aggravation you will experience to reach those moments. The Deviants themselves are annoying and the story is barely recognizable as a cohesive element. While the game may contain the elements to show off the Vita’s technological prowess, you would be better off plunking down eight dollars for Mutant Blobs Attack and investing your time in the Welcome Park application if you really wanted to “learn what the Vita can do.”