Released in 2018, Bloons Tower Defense 6 was developed by Ninja Kiwi and is their most popular game. Every day there’s an average of 9,000 players. Since it’s a tower defense game you have to survive a certain amount of rounds depending on the game mode you choose. To survive you’ll have to place down different monkeys on the map to pop the bloons. There’s two optional DLC that add a new element but you don’t have to get them since it’s just either another game mode or a story mode.

Gameplay

For the most part, you’ll start on round 1 with a little bit of money to place a cheap monkey like a Dart Monkey. As you pop bloons you get money and that lets you get more monkeys or upgrade your existing monkeys. Each monkey, other than heroes, has three paths with 5 tiers in each path. On a single monkey you can only upgrade one path to the fifth tier, and a cross path to the second tier. So people call those paths 5-0-2, 0-5-2, ect. Cross paths matter a lot because it either makes the monkey do more damage, more support, more pierce, or something else. Unlike normal monkeys, heroes get levels as you pass rounds. Some heroes are pure damage but others are support. Heroes like Sauda and Adora are basically just damage heroes but heroes like Etienne and Benjamin give support/money. The early game in bloons is rounds 1-40, then mid game from 41-80, and then late game in rounds 81-100. There is no limit to how far you can get rounds wise, but eventually the freeplay bloons scale too high to survive. I couldn’t find an exact number for the furthest round but I think it’s in the mid 700’s.

Bloons and their classes

All bloons can be popped down into a “tier” below the previous one until popped all the way down into nothing. A pink bloons turns into a yellow, then blue, red, then gone. Bigger bloons like ceramics get popped into multiple bloons, which just means more to deal with. On certain rounds new bloons show up, and keep showing up for rounds to come. For example on round 24 you see your first camo bloons. Camo’s aren’t able to be seen by monkeys unless they have camo detection. Only Ninja and Spike Factory have innate camo which just means you don’t have to get an upgrade for them to see camo. The very next round, 25, has purple bloons. These ones can’t be popped by magic projectiles so towers like Wizard Monkey aren’t able to pop them. This includes fire projectiles so the hero Gwendolin won’t be able to pop any purples without buffs. Round 28 has lead bloons which can only be popped by explosions, buffs, or fire.

Now we have MOAB class bloons. MOAB’s have far more health than a normal bloons and spawn 4 ceramics, the start showing up at round 40. Then on round 60 a BFB will show up and that has more health than a MOAB, and they’ll spawn 4 MOAB’s. The next class of bloons are ZOMG’s and, as expected, have far more health than a BFB. Of course ZOMG’s spawn 4 BFB’s. Round 90 has DDT’s and unlike our pattern we’ve been seeing they are extremely quick, need camo section, have double the health of a MOAB, and are leaded. DDT’s can really sneak up on you if you’re not paying attention to which round you’re on so watch out for that, they also just spawn 4 ceramics. Finally, the strongest MOAB class bloon, the BAD. BAD’s are the highest hp bloons in the game. On round 100 they’ll start showing up and once popped spawn 2 ZOMG’s and 3 DDT’s.

There’s certain “modifiers” bloons can spawn with. We already talked about camo’s, but there’s also regrow bloons and fortified bloons. Regrows, once popped, have a timer where they’ll regrow back into the class they were popped from. If you somehow pop a regrow ceramic bloons(1 Ceraminic→2 rainbow→4 zebra→8 black/white→16 pinks which don’t spawn multiple bloons) into a red bloons and then let them all regrow, you’ll have to deal with 16 new ceramics, just pop them like normal and not stall them. Fortified bloons will simply double the hp of the bloons that it’s on. They only spawn with leads, ceramics, and any MOAB class bloons.

Monkey’s, Buffs, Abilities, and Money Knowledge

There’s 4 different categories of towers which include primary, military, magic, and support. Their category doesn’t really matter, it’s just a way to split them all up in an easy way to view them. There’s some upgrades in the monkey knowledge tree that’ll upgrade that specific category or just give quality of live things. An example of the category of monkey mattering is with 4-0-0 and 5-0-0 village. The top path gives a buff to primary monkeys within range and also make tier one and two upgrades free. Most buffs can be given to any monkey, there’s just a few specific buffs for a category or even just a single tower. The best buffs in the game are from the alchemist 5-0-0, engineer 0-5-0, village 5-0-0/0-5-0, and sun god 4-0-0/5-0-0. There’s also a pattern with all middle tiers having an ability. Abilities can give a short buff, a burst of damage, or support with slowing bloons. Monkey Knowledge does anything from increasing attack speed, to giving extra lives, making towers cheaper, giving a free dart monkey, shorting cooldowns for abilities, or giving new targeting options. There’s even more that you unlock by an upgrade tree but it takes a really long time to get them all.

Different Modes

There’s a few different difficulties that are the same on every map. It goes easy, medium, and hard as the simple ones. Easy has 40 rounds, medium with 60, and hard with 80. Within those three difficulties there’s mini challenges you can choose, you can always just play the normal mode though.

Easy has primary monkey’s only and deflation mode where they’ll give you a ton of money but you can’t make any during rounds starting on round 31 and ending on 60. If you want to play deflation as intended, it really makes you think about how your towers will work together and how much to invest into each tower. Although on nearly every map if you get a Crossbow Master (0-2-5) and put it in a good spot it’ll just solo the whole thing.

Medium has a few more modes that are Military Only, Apopalypse, and Reverse. Monkeys also cost a bit more and you go till round 60. Apopalypse spawns random bloons each round so you might face camo’s or leads way earlier or later than normal. Rounds also get auto sent out so there aren’t any breaks unless you pause the game. Reverse is just the same exact thing as medium but bloons get sent backwards.

Finally we have hard mode which includes Alternate Bloons Rounds (ABR), Half-Cash, Magic Monkeys Only, Double HP MOAB’s, Impoppable, and CHIMPS and the rounds vary from 80 to 100. The jump in difficulty with normal medium and hard isn’t too great, but the game modes are so much harder. With Magic Monkeys Only you just have to worry about purple bloons since magic towers are pretty strong but expensive. ABR can sneak up on you and you might struggle with the crazy amount of fortifieds they send out but you get the hang of it after a bit. For double HP MOAB’s you basically just treated each one as a fortified and focus on defence. The hardest modes are Half-Cash, Impoppable, and CHIMPS. Half-Cash is obvious since you get half as much money which means less for getting good towers. Impoppable is the first mode that requires you to go to round 100 and you only get one life, no mess ups. Then we got CHIMPS. CHIMPS is an acronym which stands for no continues, no hearts lost, no income, no monkey knowledge, no powers, and no selling. The toughest parts of this is the no lives lost, no selling and no income. This mode makes you think the most since there’s no way to make money other than popping bloons, and your monkey knowledge is disabled. Surviving till round 100 is pretty hard and takes awhile for each attempt.

Accessories

There’s medals you can get from odyssey’s that show up sometimes or from boss events. In a shop you can spend those medals to get a variety of things. You can get pets for each monkey (they’ll show up for each monkey placed of that type). You can get all the world’s flags. You can get a name tag which lets you rename all your monkeys. There’s also cosmetics for bloons that reskin them to some actually really cool skins. There’s a lot more you can get and it’s all available if you’re free to play.

This is a little thing but when you beat every mode you get a border around it for a single map. If you beat every mode and then CHIMPS with exiting and reentering (exiting and reentering is like a “cheat” that you can use when you’re about to die to restart the round) you get a gold border. Beating CHIMPS without exiting and entering gives you a black border. Try to get a black border on every map, it’ll take forever.

Paragons

Two years ago there weren’t a lot of paragons but now there’s 13 of them. To make one you need to get each tier 5 and a lot of money. When you make the paragon it’ll “absorb” all of the same monkey’s. Having farms is basically required to get them. It’s possible to get all of them but it’ll take a long time. Depending on the number of pops, number of tiers absorbed, and cash put into a slider when you’re about to upgrade it, it’ll get a tier. The max degree is 100, and every 20 degrees it’ll get a massive power boost. You get these in either really long runs, or boss events

Boss Events

They just added a new boss, Diamondback, but there’s now 7. They cycle between all of them with each week being a new one. Sometimes like now they keep a boss in rotation for multiple weeks in a row to get feedback from the community when they change something. Honestly Ninja Kiwi is very receptive to their community and listens to them a lot. There’s two modes, Normal and Elite. Normal is still pretty hard and basically needs a paragon to guarantee an easy route to live. Elite is much harder and sometimes requires 4 or more paragons to be one easy street. Finally there’s the leaderboard modes where you get ranked on how fast you beat each “wave” or boss, the least amount of money spent, and the least amount of tiers spent. Bosses can get crazy modifiers that can make them faster, have far more HP, ect. April Fools Day always has an insanely difficult boss to beat.

Rouge Legends

This is the only DLC worth talking about. I believe it’s $15 but you can try it out for free for an early end to your run to get a feel for it and decide if you want it. It’s turn’s BTD6 into a Rouge Like where you go though a “world” where each tile is a short amount of rounds you beat to move on. Beating a tile gives some tokens and a choice of three powers that’ll boost/upgrade something for the rest of the run unless you get rid of it in the shop, you only get one per tile. Some special tiles are harder but give a higher tier power so you risk one of your 5 lives to attempt a chance for a strong power. There are also optional mini games where you either do a race (like a speed run of a lot of rounds, you’ll be able to send rounds on your own pace), least cash, a and boss where it has a lot less health and every time you beat it it’ll “respawn” with a little more hp. There are goals that give a common, rare, and legendary power depending which goal you reach with legendary being the hardest. The end of each world will have a Boss Bloon and after beating it you’ll be in a new world. This gameplay loop repeats till you die so it can get boring after becoming too op. That’s about it but you really got to play it or at least watch it before deciding to not play it.