Review: Little Deviants

Posted by Andrew Brewer on March 13th, 2012 | 0 Comments | Tags: Little Deviants

Accompanying any new system launch are games that like to show off what your shiny new piece of technology can do. For the Vita, Little Deviants is that game. In Little Deviants you take control of the titular characters playing through mini games as you try to reclaim the parts of your ship after you have crashed landed on the planet of the Whomans trying to escape the dastardly Botz (who have also brought the dead back to life because, you know, what’s a game without zombies these days).

The game contains 15 different mini games over 30 different levels with each game lasting for around 5 minutes on average. It was kind of disappointing to see some of the games repeat multiple times, but each time there was changes to the difficulty and visuals so it wasn’t all bad. In each game you can win ships (medals) based on your score, with at least bronze needed to unlock the next game, silver to unlock a new gallery item and gold just for bragging rights. Also in each level there is one hidden Mogger (aka cat) to collect. Overall the story mode is not too challenging to get through, I got though most of the games on my first try and finished the story mode in a little under 3 hours. But collecting the gold ships for each game is where the challenge of Little Deviants lies. In my initial play through, although I came close, I never managed to collect any gold ships. To beat each game with gold you need to play it almost perfectly and acquiring all gold would be quite a challenge.

Each of the games relies on different control methods that take advantage of the new ways to game with the Vita. The games that relied on tilting the Vita and those that used the rear camera controlled the best and were the ones that I really enjoyed. Some that required using the back touch pad took a while to get used to but out of the 15 there was only one game that controlled horribly and that I did not like at all. Before playing, each game shows you what out of the 6 different control methods you will be using and also gives a brief description as the game loads and hints as you are playing. So each game is easy to pick up and figure out. As a portable game you might find some of the games a bit difficult to play on the go though. Tilt based games can be difficult to be accurate in a moving vehicle and you may get some odd looks if you suddenly start turning around in a circle to play the AR games or whistling at your vita.

One of the features that I really liked was how the leaderboards worked. Besides each game having its own overall leaderboard they also have a leaderboard that shows your score and the next highest and lowest score from your friend’s list and people near you. From this menu you can you can contest a score that is higher then yours or send out a challenge to the person below you to try to get them to beat the score you have set. This set up allows for easy competition between friends and I hope to see more games handle leaderboards like this in the future. Besides in the leaderboards Near is also used by showing you who around you owns Little Deviants and allowing you to implement a friend request form within the game.

While Little Deviants does a decent job off showing some of the interesting new control methods of the Vita the game probably wont keep your attention for long after you finish the story mode. Most of the games are just ok with only a few standouts in the end, and I think less repeating of games and a little more variety would have gone a long way.

A copy of this game was purchased for review purposes. For more info on our review policy click here. This review is for the PlayStation Vita version of the game.