25 Best PS Vita Action Games

Attack on Titan follows the story of the anime's first season, the 25 episodes that aired from April to September 2013. Three young people survive the destruction of their walled city district by man-eating Titans and join the Scout Regiment to fight back. You get to relive the big moments of the show from inside them.

The part that sells it is the Omni-Directional Maneuvering Gear, a set of waist-mounted grappling hooks with gas-powered propulsion that lets you move in three dimensions. You zip between rooftops, hook onto a Titan and slash at it with steel swords. It looks ridiculous written down and feels great in your hands. For fans of the show it is the closest thing to strapping on the gear yourself.

Akiba's Trip is an open-world action RPG set in a virtual recreation of Akihabara, Tokyo's Electric Town district. It is the sequel to Akiba's Trip on the PSP. The enemies are synthisters, vampire-like creatures who can only be stopped by direct sunlight, and the only way to get the sun on them is to rip their clothes off in a fight.

Yes, that is the whole hook. Under the silliness is a brawler with a real map of a real neighbourhood, full of shops and side missions. A third game, Akiba's Trip Festa, followed in November 2016, and a Director's Cut came out in Japan in April 2023. On the Vita it was one of the few open-city action games you could carry around.

Dead Nation is a top-down zombie shooter, first released on the PlayStation 3 and brought to the Vita years later. You fight through the hordes alone or with a friend, and killing zombies earns money and score multipliers that you spend on better weapons. The darkness does a lot of the work, since you mostly see what your flashlight shows you.

The Vita version came with the Road of Devastation expansion, which had first come out for the PS3 in September 2011 and reached the Vita in April 2014. It is a simple game, but a very good one to play in short bursts. A level of shooting zombies in the dark is about the right length for a bus ride, if a slightly odd thing to do on one.

Nuclear Throne is an action roguelike from Vlambeer about mutants fighting their way through a post-apocalyptic world. The radiation in the wasteland lets your mutant grow new limbs on the fly, so a run can turn into something very strange very quickly. Guns are everywhere and most of them are far too powerful, which is the point.

It started life in Game Maker 7 before moving to Game Maker Studio, and it went through early access with the developers streaming their work to the public. Most of what fans know about the game's world came out during those livestreams. Runs are short, deaths are fast and you will be starting another one before you put the Vita down.

Ninja Gaiden Sigma Plus is a port of Ninja Gaiden Sigma, the remake of Team Ninja's first action game. You play as Ryu Hayabusa, out for revenge across the Vigoor Empire. The Vita version adds an easier Hero mode, gyroscope aiming when you tilt the system in first-person view and a rear touchpad tap to power up Ryu's Ninpo.

The original sold more than 1.5 million copies and became one of the ten best-selling Xbox games, and it was famous for being brutally hard. Hero mode helps, but the bosses still expect you to learn them. When players list the Vita's pure hack and slash games, this one comes up again and again. It is a big console action game that fits in your pocket.

Shinovi Versus is the third game in the Senran Kagura series and the sequel to Senran Kagura Burst. It follows three groups of female ninja from rival shinobi schools, with a roster of 20 characters, half of them new. Finish the story for each school and a fourth team unlocks, Homura's Crimson Squad from the first game.

It came out in Japan on February 28, 2013, and took until October 2014 to reach the West. The fan service is loud and the game knows it. What surprises people is how much brawler is underneath, with light and heavy attacks and a pile of strange weapons. One fighter attacks with giant pancakes, a sentence that tells you everything about the series.

Retro City Rampage is a parody of Grand Theft Auto and of 80s and 90s pop culture. It started as a homebrew project in 2002, when programmer Brian Provinciano built his own NES development kit and set out to remake Grand Theft Auto III with 8-bit sprites under the codename Grand Theftendo.

That idea grew into a full open city where you hijack cars and get the police on your tail, all in NES-style pixel art. It first came out on PS3, Vita and Windows in 2012. Provinciano brought in three well-known composers, including Jake Kaufman, for roughly two and a half hours of chiptune music. The jokes come fast, and if you grew up with a NES you will get most of them.

Downwell is about falling. You drop down a deep well with a pair of gunboots, and the boots fire straight down, so every shot slows your fall and blasts whatever is below you. You can also land on enemies to stomp them, which recharges your ammo and keeps you moving.

The run is short and the well is different each time. Gems you collect buy upgrades in shops along the way, and the right mix of upgrades turns you into a falling storm of bullets. It sounds like a small game, and it is, but it is very hard to play just once.

Hotline Miami 2 was meant to be downloadable content for the first game, but it grew longer than its predecessor and became a sequel. Dennaton made it the final game in the series and put in every idea left over from the first one. Abstraction Games built the console versions, and it came out on March 10, 2015, on the Vita among many other systems.

The levels are bigger, with large open rooms where enemies can come at you from many sides, and most chapters put you in the shoes of a different character. One story follows copycat killers called The Fans in 1991, while another takes place in a 1985 where the Soviets have invaded Hawaii. Critics praised the soundtrack and disagreed about the level design and the ending.

Super Stardust Delta is Housemarque's Vita sequel to Super Stardust HD. You fly a starship around a small planet, blasting asteroids to pieces with the dual analog sticks. The Vita version adds black holes you create with the touchscreen and shock waves you trigger with motion, and you can switch all of that off with the Pure control setup.

It has four soundtracks, three of them by Ari Pulkkinen, and the music on the Arcade and Orchestral tracks unlocks a little more each time you start the game. The Retro soundtrack needed the Near app and can no longer be unlocked since that app closed in 2017. A sad end for a bonus. The shooting itself is as sharp as anything on the system.

Liberation came out on October 30, 2012, the same day as Assassin's Creed III. It is set in 1765 Louisiana, and you play as Aveline de Grandpré, a mixed-race female Assassin in the years before the American Revolution. She changes personas to get through New Orleans, dressing as a society lady to walk where an Assassin cannot.

It runs on the same engine as Assassin's Creed III, so most of the animations are shared with the big game. Critics praised the setting and Aveline and disliked how the story was told. One reviewer called its New Orleans "a brilliant version of 18th-century New Orleans", and that city is the reason to play. It later came to the PS3 in 2014 and got a remaster in 2019.

Axiom Verge is a Metroidvania about Trace, a scientist who wakes up after a lab accident in a strange alien world. You collect a long list of weapons and tools and explore a huge maze of a map to find out where you are. The best trick is a gun that glitches the world, corrupting enemies and walls the way an old cartridge breaks when you pull it out halfway.

It came out on the PS4 in March 2015, and the Vita version followed in April 2016. On Metacritic the PS4 version scored 84 out of 100 from 61 reviews, and Jeff Gerstmann of Giant Bomb gave it a perfect score. Critics loved its secrets and its music. On the Vita's screen it looks like the Super Metroid sequel some of us always wanted.

Helldivers is a top-down shooter set in a satirical future where humanity lives under a "managed democracy" on Super Earth. Up to four players drop onto alien planets together, calling in air strikes and supply drops to get the mission done. Teamwork is the whole game, because the enemy has endless reinforcements and killing them earns you nothing.

That means you often do better by sneaking past patrols or running away from fights. It is a game about panic, and also about yelling at your friends. Helldivers sold over 4 million units by May 2024. In 2024 the sequel, Helldivers 2, turned the series into a third-person shooter. The first one is still very good on a handheld.

Rebirth is a remake of The Binding of Isaac, which Edmund McMillen and Florian Himsl first released in 2011 as a Flash game. McMillen teamed up with Nicalis to rebuild it in a better engine, which let him add a lot more content. You play as Isaac, crying your way through randomly built dungeon floors and shooting tears at monsters.

The story is based on the biblical tale of the same name, and it gets dark fast. Items stack in wild ways, so one run can make you unstoppable and the next leaves you crying tears that barely move. Reviewers loved the gameplay and found the imagery hard to stomach. By July 2015 Rebirth and the original had sold over five million copies combined.

Risk of Rain began as a project by two students from the University of Washington, made in GameMaker and funded on Kickstarter. It came out on Windows in November 2013, and console versions, the Vita among them, followed later in the decade. You fight across an alien planet as enemies and bosses keep spawning, either alone or with three friends online.

The clever part is the clock. The longer you take, the harder the enemies hit and the more health they have, so there is never time to relax. Kickstarter money paid for Chris Christodoulou to write the soundtrack, and it is one of the best things about the game. Its 3D sequel, Risk of Rain 2, came out in August 2020.

Salt and Sanctuary is a 2D action RPG from Ska Studios. It takes the stamina management and character builds of an action RPG and puts them in a side-scrolling world with punishing bosses. You wash up on an island and explore a dark, connected world full of enemies who want you dead.

The skill tree is enormous, with hundreds of possible combinations, so two players can build very different characters. It came out on the PS4 on March 15, 2016, and reached the Vita on March 28, 2017. A sequel, Salt and Sacrifice, came out in 2022. If you like dying to the same boss many times until you finally learn it, this is your kind of game.

Unit 13 plays a lot like Sony's SOCOM games. The camera stays behind your soldier in third person and shifts to a first-person aim when you zoom with the right attachments. It came out on March 6, 2012, in North America, right at the start of the Vita's life.

Its missions come in types. Direct Action lets you fight or sneak as you please, while Elite gives you health that only comes back at checkpoints. You can play all of them in co-op, and each mission unlocks a Dynamic mode that moves the objectives and enemies around. It never got the attention of Sony's bigger launch games, which makes it a good find now.

Leifthrasir is a remake of Odin Sphere, Vanillaware's 2007 game for the PlayStation 2. George Kamitani conceived the original as a spiritual successor to Princess Crown on the Saturn, with a story drawn from Norse mythology and Shakespeare. Work on the remake began in 2013 to fix the problems players and staff had with the original while keeping the story the same.

You can play it in a classic mode or in the refined mode with new boss fights and new attack moves. Hitoshi Sakimoto's Basiscape team wrote the music. Players who love Vanillaware tend to recommend it in the same breath as Muramasa and Dragon's Crown, and its story is the one they praise most.

Muramasa Rebirth is the Vita version of Muramasa: The Demon Blade, a side-scrolling action RPG set on Honshu during the Edo period. Kamitani based the story on kabuki theatre and Japanese folklore. You play as two characters, and fights start when enemies get close, with one button to attack and guard.

The Vita version has new music and a redone localization, and it got four extra stories in the Genroku Legends downloadable content. It sold well. The swordplay is simple at first, then you learn that an upward slash throws enemies into the air and the fights turn into a dance. Players still recommend it often. A new version, Muramasa: Revenant Blades, is due in 2027.

Rogue Legacy was made by Cellar Door Games, a Toronto studio of two brothers, Kenny and Teddy Lee. When your knight dies, you pick an heir to carry on, and each heir has random traits. Your daughter might be a ninja who cannot see well. Your son might be a barbarian with OCD who cleans as he goes.

The brothers spent 18 months on it, inspired by Demon's Souls and Dark Souls, and it cost them about $15,000 of their own money, all of it earned back within an hour of release. It sold more than 100,000 copies in its first week. The castle changes every time, and the gold you collect makes the family a bit stronger for the next try.

Guacamelee! is a Metroidvania from DrinkBox Studios set in a world drawn from Mexican culture and folklore, with alebrijes and the Day of the Dead all over it. You play Juan, a luchador who fights with wrestling moves like the Rooster Uppercut, and a second player can join as Tostada on the same screen.

The moves you use in fights also open new paths, so combat and platforming blend together. You can swap between the world of the living and the dead to find secrets. Juan breaks open "Choozo statues" for new powers, a direct poke at Metroid. At one point he gets turned into a rooster, which is less of a problem than you would think. Rom Di Prisco and Peter Chapman wrote the music.

Dragon's Crown is a hack-and-slash beat 'em up for up to four players, locally or online. George Kamitani first planned it as a Dreamcast sequel to Princess Crown. It changed publishers more than once, and Atlus picked it up after UTV Ignition left games. Programmer Kentaro Ohnishi steered it into a beat 'em up, something Vanillaware had never made before.

Kamitani drew on arcade brawlers like Golden Axe and The King of Dragons, and you can feel those cabinets in it. Vanillaware hand-paints the art down to single blades of grass. Critics praised the gameplay and the art and found it repetitive. It sold over one million units by September 2017, a big number for a 2D brawler.

Hotline Miami was the first commercial game from Dennaton Games, the duo of Jonatan Söderström and Dennis Wedin, and they made it in nine months. You are a hitman who gets anonymous phone calls telling you to go to certain houses and kill everyone inside. Masks you unlock change how the game plays.

It is fast and brutal, and you die in one hit, so you replay rooms until you get them right. Abstraction Games ported it to PS3 and Vita on July 25, 2013, in North America. It sold 1.5 million copies by May 2015, and its soundtrack helped make synthwave popular. Plenty of later indie games owe it something. On the Vita it plays perfectly.

Golden Abyss was a launch game for the Vita and a prequel to Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. Nathan Drake follows the trail of a 400-year-old massacre of a Spanish expedition into the jungles of Central America. Bend Studio made it, starting in 2007, with Naughty Dog overseeing the work and sharing its assets and motion capture. John Garvin directed and wrote it, with Amy Hennig supervising the script.

The team wanted to match the PS3 games and had to mix polygon models with painted backgrounds to get there. Critics praised the graphics and the voice work and criticised the story and some touch controls. It sold strongly. Only one Vita action game gets recommended by players more often.

Gravity Rush stars Kat, a girl who can shift gravity in a city that is falling apart. You tilt and move the Vita to aim her falls, so walls become floors and the sky becomes a place to land. Director Keiichiro Toyama, who made Silent Hill and the Siren series, started it in 2008 on the PlayStation 3 under the title Gravité before moving it to the Vita.

The art draws on Japanese and Western comics, including the French artist Jean Giraud, and Kohei Tanaka wrote the music. Critics praised the art and Kat and found fault with the controls. It sold 200,000 units by August 2012. A PS4 remaster and a sequel followed. Players recommend it more than any other Vita action game.