From the stable of Bloons creator Ninja Kiwi comes an all new version titled Bloons Tower Defense, released in August 2007. It is a traditional tower defense game where monkeys take over as most of the towers and you have cute Bloons as the evil enemies, hence maintaining the Bloon ethos of getting monkeys to pop balloons with darts. Here are some of the key aspects of the game:
Bloons Tower Defense works just like a standard tower defense game. You have a line of Bloons which stream in on paths and you can build towers around these paths to stop them from traversing the entire route and escaping. The game has 50 levels and you have 40 lives to get through them. Each Bloon which gets through the defense costs you one life, and as the levels rise they get progressively harder.
This crazy monkey game has 5 different types of towers, the Dart Tower (which is actually a monkey), which throws darts at a fast speed to burst balloons, the Tack Tower, which releases tacks at slow intervals to whittle the balloon level down, the Ice Tower, which freezes balloons at a slow speed allowing them to be destroyed by bombs (and bombs alone), the Bomb Tower which dispenses those bombs at a slow speed, and the last, which is also the player favorite for obvious reasons and is way more expensive than any of the other towers, the Super Monkey Tower. All these towers can be upgraded at a cost to include stronger or faster attacks and longer ranges.
The balloons (or Bloons) are very simplistically designed. There are six types: red, blue, green, yellow, black and white, which go in increasing order of speed and strength. A blue balloon releases a red one, a green one releases a blue one and so on. Each balloon is faster than the one it contains.
The flaws within the gameplay here are quite gaping. For instance, the Ice and Bomb towers only serve to slow the game down and ensure that you lose lives instead of actually helping matters. This might balance out the vastly overpowered Super Monkey, but is still a disappointment. The game is also quite easy to figure out by any standards and tends to get tedious in its easiness.
The Super Monkey is single-handedly the saving grace for this game. The speed at which it fires darts would give Rambo in all his machine-gunning glory an inferiority complex. It makes the game ridiculously easy though, and makes you wonder how much better it all could have been had the difficulty been amped up to match the Super Monkey.
To complete the game without much loss, make sure you place your Dart towers within the two main loops such that they have eyes on most parts of the grid once fully upgraded. Two to the northern part and two to the southern part should suffice. Next, place 6 Tack towers in two rows of three sticking as close to each other and to the path as possible within the first loop. Place a Dart tower directly above that part and place a couple more Tack towers in the first southern loop, again as close to the path and each other as possible. Make sure these are all fully upgraded.
Now, hoard your resources until you can make a Super Monkey, and place it between the two Dart tower groups in the middle. Make a second one right next to it as soon as you have the money and upgrade it. You might not need it, but you can place a third one in the rightmost loop to complete what should be a near-flawless victory.
The graphics are even more basic than the original Bloons games, and really tend to be a bit dull to be honest. The audio is great in that it features the sound of constantly popping balloons, and frankly, little more is expected or required.
The Bloon version of the classic tower defense game is certainly compelling but the fact that you can read how to beat the entire game within three paragraphs illustrates how easy the game can be. It could certainly have been more challenging, which is a hallmark of the Bloons series. There is a lot of potential for this game to improve because the fundamentals for an enjoyable game are all there; all it needs is to be a little more challenging and innovative. All in all, this is the game for you if you like mostly unchallenging balloon-popping.