Bloons TD 5

Hohoho… so yeah… i took these pics quite a while ago… Bloons TD 5 is an absolute BLAST! Them folks at ninjakiwi really know how to outdo themselves each time. They start out with plain old balloons… than later they added in lead balloons… then there was the ceramic bloons, and the MOAB… etc etc…

In this latest version that was introduced on the 15th of Dec last year… we see a couple of new bloon types and tower types that make the game much harder than before. Maybe its cause i've been too spoilt by the easiness of playing in double cash mode? Or did the game play step up a notch this time round… i had a lot of trouble clearing the hard mode even on the easiest track! (partly cause i've not unlocked all tower types yet but still!)

Bloons wise… the new stuff are:

1) Heart shaped regeneration bloons - these guys can regenerate, so if a pink regen bloon comes in and your towers hit it down to a red but otherwise leaves it alone for a long time, it slowly grows its layers back and eventually becomes a pink bloon again. This can be quite a problem on longer tracks and you space out your towers… such as when i play the 2nd track… i tend to put a tack tower at the very 1st bend, and a monkey buccaneer in the middle of the circular track and put the rest of my towers either near the start or the end of the track… really bad when you have a bunch of regen bloons coming your way… zebra regen bloons in particular… why so? if you pop a zebra bloon, you end up with 1 black and 1 white bloon… if those are left out for a while, they will regen into zebra bloons… each one of them, meaning that you now end up with 2 zebra bloons! This can become disastrous if your defense isn't good enough… so watch out!

2) Camo bloons - instead of camp bloons being the old camouflage bloom that lose their camo status once popped, camp bloons in TD 5 remain camo till the very end (unless hit by a mortar tower with signal flare upgrade). Since camo is changed from a kind of bloom to a status, we now have zebra camo bloons, ceramic camo bloons, and lead camo bloons. In fact, you can even have things like regen camo ceramic bloons etc etc… wicked eh?

Thanks to this new camo status change, it makes the game a lot harder than before… (and the tower changes don't really help too :S)

3) The ZOMG bloon that appears on the last level of the hard game…  by the time you hit level 85, your defenses will be able to take down the ZOMG fast enough. In fact, level 85 is actually easier than the other 8X levels… So free play mode aside, there isn't much to worry about for the ZOMG bloon actually...

Towers...

Ah… so many changes have been made to the towers that it's impossible for me to talk about them all here. Each tower now has two upgrade paths, and 4 upgrades on each path. You can get the 1st and 2nd upgrade on both paths, but you can only pick the 3rd and 4th upgrades from ONE of the paths.

A new system has been in place where the individual tower types have to gain exp in order to unlock the upgrades… that's on top of the previously in placed ranking system where you have to gain ranks to unlock different towers, maps, or game modes. Even more rpg elements! In a way it forces you to use towers that you otherwise would not use (or replay levels to gain tower exp) so that you can unlock the tower upgrades.

A bunch of tweaks have been applied to the old towers… because the towers now have two separate paths, new abilities have been added for the towers, and some old abilities have been tweaked or removed. Active abilities for towers have been added… one of the 4th tower upgrade will be an active ability - meaning that there'll be an icon at the bottom left hand corner of the playing field, and the ability will need to be activated by clicking on the icon. Using these abilities doesn’t cost any $$$, but they do have a cool down time so don't use them too hastily. For someone like me who prefers to be more passive once the round starts though, i don't like the idea of active abilities that much… i tend to forget to use them...

Also… camo detection ability has been greatly… reduced… towers like monkey ace and buccaneers used to have an upgrade that allows other towers in its radius to detect camo bloons… not anymore. Now only the monkey village has that ability… more on that later. This makes camo bloons much more problematic… especially since bloons hang on to their camo status till death, unless you use mortar towers with signal flares (that isn't reliable too, as the fire rate isn't very good so you'll need a lot of these…)

some more specific tower changes (i'll only be touching on the significant ones):

Spike factory… is missing! Yup, no spike factories in TD 5, no idea why… spike factory was quite fun to play around with (when you have double cash mode on)… although not very powerful. Its missing from TD 5 though… guess it didn’t make the cut eh?

New tower - monkey village. Basically a remake of the monkey beacon. The basic tower reduces the upgrade cost of towers within its range by 10% - a new ability that's useful for all that expensive 4th tower upgrades (especially the super monkeys). However, the range of the monkey village is GREATLY reduced… so make sure you plan where to put this tower properly. The 2nd upgrade on the 2nd path grants camo detection to towers within its range. Considering that the range of the village is so short now, i feel that it's a bit of a waste to put towers that can already detect camos in the range of the villages. Sure they can benefit from the range and speed upgrades etc, but there is a bunch of camo bloons levels that are really tough when playing in hard mode… so much so that i feel that its essential to place a village next to your super monkey camp to allow the super monkeys to take part in the camo massacre. The upgrade cost reduction helps a lot too...

New tower - sniper tower. LIke the mortar, this guy can hit anywhere on the map. Unlike the mortar, snipers… snipe at balloons. Not a specific spot like the (dumb) mortars. Useful for preventing leaks early on… this guy upgrades to be bit of a meanie as it learns abilities like crippling MOAB-class bloons. I'm not too fond for this guy though, as late in the game its influence seems… too insignificant to notice? That's just me though… (and i didn’t actually spend a lot of time testing out this tower properly… too much new stuff!)

New tower - ninja monkey. This ninja can detect camo bloons just as any ninja should. Upgrades like homing ability for shurikens and distraction (the ninja version of tornados) makes it a good tower for taking out camos.

Monkey ace - back than, these guys didn’t take up any land space, so as long as you have the money, you can buy as many of these as possible… Things changed now though… they need space to place - a small strip of a runway… they can now fly in vertical of horizontal figure of 8, or in a circle. The path of the flight can't be changed though - like you can't put the tower at the left hand side, and ask the monkey ace to fly all the way on the right side… the path is pinned to where its airstrip is now… path 2 4th upgrade gives the air supply ability that drops $500-1500 each time… on hard mode it costs $12k to get, so that'll take about 12 uses to get your money back… i wonder how long the CD time is though...

Dart towers got a bit of an upgrade. They have an upgrade to see camo bloons, allowing them to help in camo bloon killings. This is especially when the game just started, but later on you'll need a lot more to stop the hoards of camo bloons passing through.

Super monkey - the 4th upgrades for the super monkey are the technological terror and temple of monkey god. I feel that the 2nd upgrade path is much weaker than the 1st upgrade path though… (well it's much cheaper after all). Upgrading the sun god to the temple requires a ridiculous amount of money, and also cosmos up to 40 towers within the range of the super monkey. The new tower will now have the abilities of the absorbed towers… like casting tornadoes etc. The temple doesn’t seem very powerful w/o absorbing other towers though… at least it felt so from my brief sandbox mode testing. This allows the clearing of space to build more new towers… although i find it hard to get enough money to build the temple (and continue building other towers after that) unless you use loads of...

Banana farms! This time round, they really GROW bananas that you have to pick up for cash… The bananas are spread out to spawn evenly over the round, so the spawning speed of the bananas depends on how many are going to spawn (depending on ur upgrades), and how long the round lasts. So in say round 46 with just 1 MOAB, there'll be a massive burst of bananas appearing right when the round starts. If you hate having to mouse over to collect the bananas, you can pick the 2nd upgrade path (3rd and 4th upgrades). You'll earn $ after each round (like last time), but the $ earned is keep in the banana farm bank. You can withdraw the banked money anytime, but since you earn interest for the $ stored each round, the ideal situation is to withdraw money ONLY when the bank is close to being full.

ok, a few more screens before i end my post…!

Here are the brand new tracks in TD5:

 

With more awesomer graphics… it also comes with a more awesomer menu

medals call up a screen like this, earning medals will get you monkey cash to buy special agents with

And the special agents… i've not bought any so far… but i guess they are all one use items...

Well the premium shop is always there… allowing you to unlock things like double cash… but it'll more often than not, make the game way too easy and destroy the fun of the game. Yeah its frustrating when you keep losing, but that's what keeps me playing...

And finally, the bloons-tower-pedia…

here you can see all the towers, their upgrades, and a description of each upgrade

 

 

ok! that's all i've to say about bloons TD 5… now why don't you go give it a try? ;)