Monday, October 22, 2007

Bloons Tower Defense II Review!

Bloons Tower Defense II
By NinjaKiwi

Bloons was an amazingly popular and simple game that put NinjaKiwi on the map of game productions. Its charm led it to have a large forum community, a game where you could make your own levels, and the hugely popular, though far too easy, Bloons Tower Defense. Now NinjaKiwi has expanded the concept, with 3 different difficulties and maps, new towers, on the track temporary power ups, and new Bloons, and it is a blast to play.



Gameplay: The game has a simple charm and plays really well. The basic goal is to stop all bloons from crossing over from the entry point to the exit. The game starts out simple and gives you a decent bit of cash, but it quickly swaps slow, 1 hit red bloons for blue bloons, which have a red bloon in them and move faster. Those are swapped out for greens, and then yellows, both of which get faster. Along the way your roundly bonus drops, which means you have less income coming except for the killing of bloons. Unlike most Tower defense games, the damage is static, you always pop bloons one stage at a time so you don’t have to worry too much about optimization, and can worry about tower placement instead. The upgrades system is nice, and you always feel like you did well, even if you lost, because you can usually tell exactly where it went wrong so you can do better next time. The difficulty is much better than the old game, and towers are more balanced, like lead bloons which are invincible to the first versions end all strategy of having 40+ piercing dart monkeys on the field. Overall this gets a 10/10.

Sound
: The sounds are very nice and relaxing, and they all fit well. I personally tested it, and yes, throwing a dart onto a frozen or metal object will sound roughly like it does in game. The explosion sounds are a bit under-dramatic, but for a relaxing style tower defense game I hardly even consider that a flaw. The freeze orb sounds cool, the bloons popping is relaxing, and the super monkeys laser eyes sound awesome. The only real complaints I have is that the boomerang should have a slightly different sound with the sonic boom upgrade and that there could be some very light background music, but otherwise the sound is rock solid. 9/10

Graphics: The graphics are the worst part of the game, but still fairly nice. The towers look simplistic and could probably be recreated with minimal effort on Microsoft Paint, but they are very nice. The bloons are true to form simplistic but nice looking, including the detailing on the lead bloons. The white bloons suffer though, and they look kind of out of place in the game. Also, sometimes additions to graphics with upgrades would be nice, like once again for the sonic boom to be visible on boomerang towers and maybe the towers changing colors or shape with upgrades would have been nice. Overall 8/10.

Story: It is a flash game and a tower defense one at that. Who cares. N/A

Replayability: Very high, you will have hours of fun, and it doesn’t take too much in game effort, just between rounds customization, so being able to beat it while doing something else just makes it that much more enjoyable. Plus with 3 difficulty settings and and well over 1 billion different setups to try (assuming you put towers in the strangest locations) you will have fun for hours figuring out new challenges, like a boomerang and bomb only game, or just how to plain slaughter every bloon that ever will exist.

Overall this game is a solid 9/10. Get out there and pop some bloons!

5 comments:

Nqkoi1 said...

Your giving too high scores for nothing.

Nate said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
r3p3nt said...

I'm sorry, but the gameplay isn't even close to 10/10. Reviews only gain value if they set the bar higher then normal.

Milskidasith said...

OK.... I will break it down for you.

The gameplay for me had no errors, and was an interesting take on the tower defence genre. Unlike most tower defence games, not all the towers were simply firing straight at the enemy with no chance of missing, which was intuitive and fun. Above the normal. The combinations of towers (mostly freeze combos) above the normal standards of a great game. Multiple upgrade paths that never shows a clear winner. Beyond the normal. Also, all normal expectations(lag, actually functioning, balancing) were acheived to perfection.

Yes, you will have some lag. But I only had any with my fair computer starting around round 35+ with 15 towers, which is way more than most games take to start lagging.

Unknown said...

Keep your eyes peeled, BTD3 coming in two weeks...