Bloons TD 5 Review

Introduction

Tower Defense is a pretty simple genre. Something's trying to get to a goal, and it's your job to stop it. While there are many cheap and easy games in this genre, there are a few standouts that make it shine. By looking at its various parts, it's easy to see why Bloons TD 5 has become one of those standouts.

Concept - 3

Bloons TD 5 is a defense game through and through. Like most Tower Defense games, there's not a story here. You can purchase several different monkeys - the game's version of towers - and you'll use them to try to stop a series of different balloons from making their way around a track. Each monkey has its unique powers, and the balloons each have their individual qualities.

The truth is that there's nothing at all that's novel in this game. You can upgrade your towers to be sure, but that's pretty much par for the course. Even the idea of being able to choose upgrade paths or to fight on unique challenge maps is an old hat for the genre. The concept itself is good, though. Bloons TD 5 is about as good as the style gets.

Graphics and Audio - 4

Bloons TD 5 is visually a good looking game, especially when you consider it's just the latest iteration in a very long-running Flash series. The game manages to do the most important thing you can do in a tower defense game well - every tower and enemy has a unique look that makes it easy to judge what's going on at a glance. It's impossible to overstate how important this is and how terrible it can be when a game gets it wrong. Fortunately, Bloons has never really had an issue with the design of its characters.

The audio is likewise useful. The music is not bad, but it's the sound effects that are real winners. Every monkey's powers are easy to identify by sound, and there's a marked difference when they hit the different classes of balloons. The overall soundscape is one of the best in the genre, only limited by the nature of the game itself.

Gameplay - 5

The Bloons series generally has a good reputation, and the fifth iteration of the game goes a long way towards keeping the series as a whole on solid footing. Each map is well designed, and there is never a sense that a loss is unfair - just that the player hasn't found the optimal strategy quite yet. Anyone can get good at this game, but only a precious few are going to be able to master it at the highest level of play. As a simple Flash game, it's all that you could want.

The only downside is the free-to-play mechanics. The game would like you to spend money, and by doing so, it makes the later levels a lot easier. These mechanics have eliminated on later releases. But all this has done is drastically up the difficulty level on some of the maps. It's a shame to see a good series fall prey to issues like this.

Conclusion - Replayability - 5

If you like Tower Defense games, you'll love Bloons TD 5. The free-to-play mechanics hurt the game a bit, but it's still one of the best overall games in the genre. Don't be fooled by how simple it looks - you can lose countless hours on these maps. While it's not the last game in the series, this one is arguably still the best.

TL/DR

Bloons TD 5 is a Tower Defense game that pits monkeys against balloons in an all-out war.