Bloons TD 5

Bloons TD 5 is one of the most fun and refined tower defense games available. Pop evil balloons before they reach their sinister objective by strategically placing monkeys with darts, airplanes, explosives, and more.

Tower defense games have been around for decades. In a classic tower defense game, enemies spawn at one end of a map and attempt to follow a fixed path to get to the other end. As the player, your job is to stop them from getting all the way to the end of the path. You can place defensive structures, called towers, along that path. These towers attack the enemies with projectiles, slowing effects, and more.

The original Bloons TD was a flash game on a now-defunct website. It’s been iterated and improved upon many times over the years. Bloons TD 5 isn’t the newest and flashiest game in the franchise, but it’s still a refined, polished, and incredibly fun tower defense game that’s worth visiting for serious fans of the genre. If your device can handle it, however, you may want to check out newer entries in the series like Bloons TD 6.

In Bloons TD games, you play as a faction of monkeys. Your enemies take the form of evil balloons. These “bloons” are nearly trivial to pop, requiring a single dart thrown by a monkey – at first. As you progress through the game, you’ll encounter balloons filled with other balloons, armored balloons, zeppelins, and all sorts of other crazy shenanigans. To counter this, you’ll be able to build monkeys in planes, crazy monkey temples, and other powerful characters that can give you a big advantage over your foes.

Bloons TD 5 was a freemium game – once. These days, the freemium features are a mere shadow of their former self. You can get lots of premium currency by just playing the game, meaning you shouldn’t have to spend a lot of money in order to beat all of the levels and challenges. The game will certainly tempt you, but you’ll probably find that it’s more fun to figure out how to deal with the difficulty organically than it is to throw money at the game. Part of the fun is to unlock all sorts of new monkeys, maps, and strategies, and unlocking these gameplay elements by spending cash will short-circuit the gameplay loop and may make the game less fun.

Speaking of fun, it’s worth mentioning again that Bloons TD 5 is one of the best tower defense games, ever. It’s overshadowed these days by its newer brethren like Bloons TD 6, but even in the current age Bloons TD 5 blows a lot of its competition out of the water. The game isn’t perfect, but the crisp UI, varied towers, and simple challenges help ensure that everyone can have a lot of fun. Perhaps best of all, because the game is no longer being actively developed, any strategy you come up with is guaranteed to work forever. There won’t be any sneaky patches that ruin your fun.

Bloons TD 5 is available on pretty much every platform you can think of. You can get it on mobile, on consoles, on Flash (if you’re willing to figure out how to make Flash work), and on PC. It’s an incredibly fun game that serves as a perfect introduction to the tower defense genre for newcomers and a classic throwback for old-school fans.

The introduction of freemium mechanics to the Bloons TD series changed how the game was played in a big way. The key to success in Bloons TD 5 is to get the double money upgrade early and sit on it for as long as possible. With this upgrade rolling, you’ll be able to have more than enough cash to make just about any configuration of towers that you can dream of. Refined strategies are still helpful, but you’ll have lots of room for error. More importantly, you’ll have room to experiment and build fun towers rather than being limited to a small set of “meta” options.

You don’t strictly need this upgrade to play the game. In fact, experienced Bloons TD 5 players can still blaze through the game without it. They will, however, need to think carefully about their decisions and stick to a small subset of proven strategies. This method of playing the game is a lot less fun than the double-money path. While the double money upgrade might make things “too easy,” it enables you to splurge on towers you find fun or interesting. Doing a “challenge run” without this upgrade will dramatically limit your options, and the challenge won't test your skills so much as it tests your knowledge of how good various towers are.

A lot of your progression in Bloons TD 5 happens between missions. After each mission, you’ll earn currency you can use to upgrade your towers, monkeys, and abilities. If you’re playing on double money, be sure to experiment here. Dump upgrades on anything that seems fun or anything you like to use. If you’re not, you might want to focus your upgrades on the Super Monkey and the banana farm. The first tower will obliterate pretty much every enemy in the game, while the second one will help give you the currency you need to build lots of them. 

Early in the game, don’t be afraid to dump upgrades on your basic dart monkeys. These little guys will put in lots of work, even as you begin to approach the late game. You’ll need to supplement them with more powerful towers, of course, but some early upgrades in your basic dart monkeys will pay big dividends.

Don’t forget about boosting structures like Monkey Villages! The effects of these buildings can turn lackluster towers into absolute monsters that shred even the tankiest bloons. Upgrades on these buildings are key, especially when you’re boosting powerful, upgraded towers. Expert players swear by their Monkey Villages and spend a lot of time figuring out how to best place them to hit as many towers as possible.

Are you a Bloons TD 5 expert? How do you think Bloons TD 5 compares to 6? What are your favorite towers to upgrade early? Let us know in the comments below!