Review of Bloons TD Battle by Ninja Kiwi

Hello all,

This blog is about things that interest me, and in this case it's a phone game I play because my step-son introduced me to it.  It's called Bloons TD Battle by a company called Ninja Kiwi.  And it's actually a pretty fun game concept.  I like playing sometimes.  But the game suffers from a few big problems.

Description of the Game

So imagine that balloons are somehow bad and they travel along a track starting in one spot to reach an end spot.  If they reach the end spot, they do damage to you.  If enough hit, you die and lose.  To stop the balloons you have a variety of monkeys.  The monkeys attack and pop the balloons in a variety of ways, each with strengths, weaknesses, and a variety of special abilities.

Some of the towers require water on the map/track, while most of them have to be put on land.  Some of the balloons are camouflaged, or multilayered, or armored (lead), or even heal over time if you don't keep hitting them.  Then there are the blimps... the really big balloons that take a lot of damage to take down, and they pour forth a ton of smaller balloons when they pop.

There's actually a really interesting strategy to dealing with the variety of balloons using the variety of towers.  You try to build up your defenses quickly and with the ability to cover the varieties you need to be able to defend against while also increasing your income.

And that leads me to the contest part.  You're playing against someone else who is on the same map at you.  You can see both maps, and see what towers they're building.  And the way you increase your income (most of the time) is by spending some of your money to send more balloons at your opponent.  Every six seconds you receive the amount of your income.  So making that amount higher means more quickly getting money to buy more expensive towers to use in your defense.  Again... a really interesting component that adds to the balancing act.  The goal of the game is to out last your opponent.

Problem #1: Some of the towers are horrendously unbalanced

The basic tower is a dart monkey.  He throws darts at the balloons to pop them.  You can upgrade the dart monkey as you get enough money, and he'll throw sharper darts faster, and then three darts at once, and eventually you can make him a member of the "Super Monkey Fan Club" which gives the monkey a special ability you can use that basically turns them into a machine gun of darts for a short while.  Actually, there are two paths you can improve your monkey on.  If you don't head for the super monkey fan club, you can have your dart monkey start manning a sort of spike ball catapult that can pop lots of balloons at once.  Neat basic tower, and there are a number of neat towers with cool character.  But there are also several towers that are flat out broken.

Cobra (secret agent monkey)

The tower itself isn't fantastic at popping balloons, but its special abilities are powerful, and one of them is broken.  They have ability to steal health from the other player, and give it to you.  Seems to be 2 health (out of 150) every 6 seconds.  And you can have multiple of this tower to speed things up.  Unless the other player is also using the same tower to cancel them out, they get to just sit there and watch their health go down.  There's nothing they can do about it.  It's broken.  I quit/surrender the second I see my opponent level up their Cobra to steal health.  I have no interest in playing against them if they're looking to use such a douche-bag move.

Super Monkey

This tower I like in general too... but one of the two advancement paths is called "Sun God" and "Temple of the Monkey God".  This path is basically "god mode" or a trump card... you keep making these temples, and it's so much more powerful than anything else available.  When I see an opponent going this route I lose hope.  It's the closest to cheating you can get with the stuff the game allows.  Well... maybe with the Banana Farm.  But still... the balance is way off on this tower.

Banana Farm

This is the tower that makes me the angriest.  It's a tower that lets you grow bananas, which give you money when you harvest them.  By itself, it's not bad.  If a person wants to spend one of their three tower choices on the farm to get more money faster, that's fine.  But it's what the jerks in the game use it for.  I mentioned that the way you increase your income is by sending balloons at your opponent.  Well, in later levels of the game, the really powerful MOABs starting showing up, and if you're willing to lose all your income, you can send MOABs at your opponent.  And with the balloon boost, and enough of the banana farms, you can send LOTS of the MOABs at your opponent all at once.  It doesn't matter what defense you've built up by this point, You simply lose.  That's it.  It's the most shitty thing a player of the game can do.  It's not fun.  It's the mark of a pure asshole.  And the fact that the game allows this is ridiculous.

Problem #2: Ninja Kiwi Support

I wrote to Ninja Kiwi a couple times to mention the distinct imbalance, and request a new mode of play that would allow people who don't want to play that awful version of the game to play something fun.  I worded it more diplomatically.  I tried to point out the detractor to fun that those imbalances could be.  The response I got was offensively dismissive.  I was told that they were happy with the balance, and the request for another mode was entirely ignored.  So I'm not impressed by the support person I dealt with.  And since I responded to their survey saying I wasn't happy with their service without getting any kind of reply, I'm guessing that the rest of support isn't real impressive either.

Conclusion

The game can be fun, and it has a lot of potential.  But it does have frustrating imbalance problems, and the support people I dealt with were rude and dismissive.  I recommend playing the game for fun, but don't spend any money it.  Don't support a company that is so rude to customers.