Classic Tower Defense Experience: Is BTD6 as enjoyable as its predecessors?

Bloons Tower Defense 6 (BTD6) is the sixth game of a series of tower defense classics published by New Zealand based developer Ninja Kiwi. The first part of the “bloons-games-series” was released in 2007, BTD6 was released in June 2018, 11 years later. During that time span the graphics have evolved a lot and some game elements have changed but the basic gameplay idea always stayed the same.

If you’re looking around for mobile games to play check out our article about 5 action mobile games. As always feel free to leave your opinion or stories about BTD6 in the comments below this article.

Why am I even doing this? – Story

As many other Tower Defense Games the story is not very important in BTD6. The key aspect is that you are in charge of a monkey city which needs to be defended against an attack of balloons. Why? Well we don’t know but when playing a tower defense game what you are fighting doesn’t matter too much anyway.

“Where is my cursor” – Game appearance

The characters are designed in a cartoonist style and look like they were made for a children’s game. Don’t get me wrong though: I thing they look really cool and the skins that Ninja Kiwi releases are also really nice.

Sound-wise there is an amazing sound track that everyone who has played BTD recognizes instantly and there’s a variety of sound effects for all the different heroes and monkeys. Furthermore all balloons make a different noise when popping which can be quite annoying on the higher rounds when many of them are destroy in a matter of seconds.

Balloon destroyers – Gameplay

Regarding the gameplay, BTD6 offers a classical challenging tower defense experience. Players have to strategically place towers along a predetermined path to pop balloons before they reach the end of the path. Over time more balloons appear and they get new abilities, more health points or more protection. Have a look at this chart showing the different layers of bloons to get an idea of the available variety. (by the Bloons Wiki)

The path itself is different depending on the map you choose beforehand. Every map also has their own theme which adds great variety to the gameplay.

If you can’t prevent the balloons from reaching the end you’ll loose life points. On the other hand destroying the balloons or completing rounds rewards you money that can be used to purchase new monkey “towers” or to upgrade them. If a tower destroys balloons it earns experience points which are used to unlock the upgrades for the monkey that can then be bought later in the game.

Each tower or monkey has its unique abilities and strengths, and players must carefully choose which towers to place and where to place them to maximize their effectiveness. There a 3 paths with 5 upgrades for each tower and some of them even have a sixth final upgrade: the paragon. These are really powerful upgrades that require lots of Xp to unlock and are used in the endgame. If you purchased a tier 5 upgrade for one tower you can place another tower of the same kind with the same tier 5 upgrade.

Especially on higher game rounds you will need to organize the tower placement a bit as it gets increasingly important to develop some kind of strategy against different kind of balloons.

BTD6 also added a hero system (which wasn’t available in BTD5). Heroes are basically a type of tower that can only be placed once and levels up over time which unlocks special abilities. You can also purchase skins for the hero of your choice with monkey money. This currency can be bought with real money.

There are multiple gamemodes and difficulty settings to offer many different experiences. With different difficulties you need to complete a different amount of rounds. After having successfully done that you can enter the free play where you earn less experience points but can go open end.

You can also complete daily challenges made by other players or create your own. There are race-events where you can earn rewards based on how fast you complete. Ninja Kiwi also occasionally adds a boss-event in the game.

My second favorite gamemode after the classic coop matches is the Odyssey where to need to complete 3 levels on a chosen difficulty with a certain amount of monkeys you can select. This was quite challenging but also lots of fun as you learn to use tower effectively.

Slowmotion action – Hardware requirements

The hardware requirements are quite low making it possible to even play the game on tablets and smartphones (see below). Sadly when playing the game to higher rounds it is completely irrelevant which hardware you have as the game engine itself is completely overwhelmed with the amount of balloons and effects from you monkey army. Even with relatively high-end hardware we found the game not using all of the available RAM space or processing power of the GPU.

We do a little grinding – Achievements and experience curve

The game in itself is running hard in the endgame but in itself it’s difficult for the placer when just starting out.

You learn quickly just by completing different levels. Using different towers helps a lot to get some basic understanding of tactics. If you want to learn fast either read some of the strategy guide on the Bloons Fandom or just play the daily challenges which only give you certain monkeys to complete a map.

There are 146 steam achievements to complete if you want to 100% the game and at the moment 23 towers that can be leveled up to unlock all upgrades. By completing certain event you also earn trophies that can be used to purchase items in a trophy shop. These include skins for bloons, user avatars or new emotes.

As you play you’ll earn experience points and level up. This rewards you with monkey knowledge that can be used in a skill tree for tower improvements. There are 4 skill trees for each monkey category.

“Can you give me X amount of money?” – Crossplay

Earning Experience points gets boring after some time so why not do it together:

Because the game is running on PC (Steam) as well as on mobile it offers a really great crossplay experience. This especially comes in handy when you want to play a short and spontaneous round with friends where not everyone has the a laptop with them. So far we only experienced one disconnect in a coop match, playing the low rounds works really well.

Another cool feature is the cloud save that makes switching from one device to another really easy. This also keeps your data safe if you loose your mobile phone with the game on it. If you want to have more security for your Ninja Kiwi Account we recommend linking an email to your account to get messages if someone new logs in. (Go to settings > Account > Email)

Conclusion

Let us know in the comments if you managed to beat our record at round 228 (sadly one of us got disconnected) on normal difficulty with the map “Four Circles”.

Get BTD6 here