You have a choice between 5 different towers that all have varying weapons, strengths and weaknesses. You need to deploy the right balance of towers to pop all the balloons and proceed to the next level. The game grants you 40 lives to survive with, 1 life is taken for every balloon that escapes your towers. When all 40 lives are lost the game is over.
The five 5 towers available for deployment to aid you in your quest are:
All towers have varying costs and can be upgraded in 2 ways to provide a more powerful defense and offense. The general upgrades to any tower are: (a) A wider range firing range (b) A more powerful firing mechanism.
The first level is very easy to complete and is designed as a simple introduction. Later levels become increasingly difficult to complete, with an increase in the speed of the balloons, the quantity and their last ability.
The standard red balloons are the first type you will come across in your defense of the pathway. These take one single pop and prove very easy to neutralize with a couple of weak monkey towers proving more than their match. Blue balloons are introduced in the early levels also, these balloons comprise 1 red balloon, so when a blue balloon is burst, 1 red balloon spills out which also needs to be popped. Green balloons need to be popped into blue balloons and the red balloons and yellow balloons obviously follow the same pattern above green balloons. The same can also be noted about each balloon's speed, with yellow balloons proving faster than green, green faster than blue and blue faster than red.
Larger different colored balloons emerge in later levels, they need splitting down again and again before they are neutralized and also fly past your towers at a rapid pace making them hard to target and pop. These include lead Balloons and multi coloured balloons that once split release a huge amount of other balloons that will need popping fast. The screen can become overloaded with a huge amount of balloons towards the end levels which may cause your computer to slow down depending on how powerful it is!
The Bloons Tower Defense game is an enjoyable alternative take on the original Bloons game and provides a much needed change from the series.