What kind of console launch would it be without the staple mini-game collection? Indeed, this generation at least, every new console seems to launch with a proof of concept title, something to show off what your new, shiny piece of hardware can do, to show off its new moves. Bigbig Studios has taken up the task for the PlayStation Vita, and came up with Little Deviants, a collection of “30” mini-games that showcase just what the PlayStation Vita is capable of. Does Little Deviants do enough to differentiate it from the drones of mini-game shovel-ware? Not entirely, but it makes a valiant, if not flawed attempt at doing so.

The premise of Little Deviants is simple. A strange, alien species, known as the Deviants, crash-land to earth having been chased by their enemies, the Botz. Your objective is to complete each of the “30” (quotation marks are on purpose, but we’ll get to that in a bit) mini-games, each one giving you a new piece for your Deviants’ space ship, which they need to get off your planet. The dastardly Botz will do their utmost to try to thwart you at every step, to make sure that they destroy the Deviants once and for all.

Let’s face it, the story in Little Deviants is very thin. It’s more of a premise with an ending, sandwiching virtually no story in between, however, that’s not what a game like Little Deviants is about. It’s about the games, and in some respects, Little Deviants succeeds in providing some relatively enjoyable experiences that take advantage of each of the PlayStation Vita’s control methods – which it makes a point of telling you so by including a trophy for playing a game that uses each input method, though it does fall short in quite a few areas.

The games you play range from shooting Deviants out of a cannon, knocking Botz out of windows, stroking the back touch to morph terrain, flying a speeder, guiding a jetpacking Deviant through caves, rolling Deviants around a course, pulling the ropes of a boxing ring to slingshot your Deviant to take out zombies, and even singing into your Vita’s microphone to shatter glass, talent not withstanding. The base selection of game types is pretty wide, although the game’s claim of offering 30 games is pretty disingenuous, considering many of them are just re-skinned versions of other games, or even just more difficult versions of previous games. It’s unfortunate that some of the most interesting games, the ones I enjoyed the most, were the one-offs, whereas the more generic, obvious games were repeated quite a lot.

A lot of those games over-stay their welcome too, with some of them just being way too long. Again, the games I wanted to play more of were only short, fleeting experiences, yet the longer ones just had me bored and even failing early just to get to the next game. Each game you play grades you with a spaceship medal depending on your score. You need a minimum of bronze in a game to unlock the next game, while silver will unlock some concept art. Gold medals are extremely hard to obtain, and even after finishing the game, I still haven’t obtained a single gold medal. It seems to get a gold, you have to be pretty much perfect in everything you do, and Little Deviants doesn’t make that easy. At the very least, you’ll have to collect pretty much each and every star in that mini-game, as these stars award yo with vital bonus points, and collecting all in a stage will net you a nice bonus.

Unfortunately, that’s not very easy to do in Little Deviants. The game has a serious problem with not sign-posting your objectives. It’ll give you a general overview of what you need to do to complete that game, but I still found myself struggling at times to get to grips with same of the games. In fact, most of the things I learned in each game came from when I did something wrong; one particular example of this was a game where I had to roll my Deviant around an area using the back touch pad to find keys to unlock a portal to the next stage. I had seen two similar levels before, but this one had various crates scattered around it. The game didn’t explain to me what I need to do to open them, so I bounced off it, tried to land on them etc. I didn’t find out what to do until the third stage of that game, where the game randomly told me to tap on them repeatedly until they broke, and that they contained those vital stars. This meant I had missed two stages worth of stars, and I had to restart that mini-game to get a decent score, and it wasn’t even a particularly fun game.

There is also a set of cats for you to collect, called “Moggers”, with one in each of the 30 mini-games. They can be viewed in a sort of gallery from your player record, but I still don’t know what the significance of them is. The game’s manual doesn’t say, and neither does the game itself. Does unlocking all 30 of them unlock some secret mini-game? I don’t know, and the only way for me to find out is to try to get all 30, which I don’t particularly want to.

Thankfully, the gameplay in Little Deviants is very strong. The controls work pretty much flawlessly, with the gyro-motion sensors, rear touch pad and touch screen working with fantastic accuracy. The visuals are very strong also, with a simply, yet very pretty, art style – the Vita’s 5 inch OLED screen certainly helps to make the visuals look stunning. The cheery, light-hearted soundtrack a joy to listen to, and although Little Deviants doesn’t let you use your own custom soundtracks in games, I honestly didn’t want to.

Little Deviants is a game with a lot of great ideas, but its execution is lacking at times. The inclusion of “near” support and the ability to challenge your friends to beat your high score is welcome, although nothing revolutionary. Poor explanation of the game’s mechanics and repetition of the least interesting games hold it back from being the mini-game collection that breaks the mold. However, I can’t deny that I did have some good fun playing it despite its shortcomings. It’s an able game with plenty of faults, but is still fun to pick up and play nonetheless.