Bloons Monkey City

Link: Bloons Monkey City
Developed by NinjaKiwi
Genre: Tower Defense/Management


Gameplay in Bloons Monkey City can be broken down into two things. The first is your typical tower defense gameplay where you place your monkeys and other dart throwing mechanisms around a level and pop thousands of balloons. The second part of Bloons Monkey City plays more like a city building management game like Goodgame Big Empire or even Clash of Clans. You start out with a small "city" and you need to build different buildings to be able to use all the monkeys and upgrade them.

In theory and on paper this idea is certainly an interesting one. Bloons Monkey City seems to be the first game to kind of blend city building and tower defense. However, in practice it just seems to heavily limit typical Bloons action all around. Having to build different monkey towers to gain access to just a single monkey of that type and then have to wait real time for it to finish stifles gameplay. For instance, you'll build a ninja monkey building which takes 500 gold and 15 minutes to build for access to just one ninja monkey. You'll have to build another one to get two ninja monkeys to place. To unlock upgrades you'll need to build buildings for each class of monkey and then separately upgrade them which also takes time. Even worse is that there is an energy limit to everything. Each building uses a certain amount of energy/power and once you reach that limit you have to build either windmills or watermills to up the limit. Of course, NinjaKiwi wants you to use real money to skip all these ridiculous wait times and such but it is terrible that this is what Bloons has come to.

There is a new feature (or expanded feature) that allows for PvP (or monkey vs. monkey) battles. This allows you to send balloons to friends or random people to gain in game cash to build buildings. However, before you can even do this you have to build four or five different buildings and then research different balloon types. Again..forced to artificially wait before getting into anything moderately fun.

In general, I like the idea of what Bloons Monkey City is trying to accomplish but when the developers push this hard to force IAPs and wait times on us...for a flash game, it pushes me away. However, having to play tower defense levels to expand your city is an interesting concept, even if it ultimately turned Bloons into a grind fest. Also, Bloons Monkey City is the most polished of the Bloons games and has a lot of interesting towers/upgrades. Yet still, Bloons Monkey City is now a bastardized Bloons game full of everything I hate about the current state of mobile and casual gaming.