4:03 As someone who has _only_ played previous BTDs, those little track marks that show what direction the bloons'll be going is such a nice quality of life feature that I wish was a thing in the first five games.
Honestly they’re usually not very helpful. It seems helpful for maps with confusing layouts, but only showing the beginning and end of a path doesn’t really help as much as you’d think.
something that i find with BTD6 as a whole. and thats fine because by that point you're probably juist fine with playing the game just to play the game
You do that captain! I'm going to keep pretending I know what I'm doing with the BTD6 equivalent of White Girl Starbucks of Geraldo + Robo Monkey / Sniper / Plane / Spactory
I really feel you on the struggle BTD6 has with rewards, and the newest update has a new example of that. The new Boss Challenge mode gives absolutely nothing for rewards. Even if you beat a boss on a high difficulty map
i thought of the boss challenge feature as a way to just test boss strats before before the weeks boss comes out and just a general sandbox way to play with bosses, since it was impossible to play with bosses without a mod before the update
@@DaveyGunface what if it makes your lead to gold alchemist hit 1 more bloon before something can crack the lead, giving you just enough monkey money to get down a farm 1 round sooner snowballing your income???
@@frozenbonkchoy4986 I'm assuming its based on the ever so hilarious and DEFINITELY not overused "My gender is an apache attack helicopter" joke, since the top path is literally just an Apache
Mine is Kobe Bryant. A lot of my towers are named after celebrities associated with them, or tragedies associated with them, like my ace is called Nine Eleven
you forgot some of the best parts about btd6 co-op: 1) the ability to delete pontoons or pools underneath your opponent's towers, which deletes them for no cash back, 2) the netcode which is fine, unless one of your friends is playing on mobile or is tabbing out on their mediocre computer, in which case welcome to near-constant desyncs (which pause the game for 15 or 30 seconds each, until your friend is booted, so they tab back in, and then out, restarting the cycle) and 3) how having multiple heros wrecks the balance of the game, making a lot of maps trivially easy even if you aren't spamming insta-towers
tbh its worth noting that chimps on expert maps is so difficult because the BTD community is so divided in terms of skill. On one hand, there are a bunch of baby boys who like casual gameplay and love playing easy and intermediate maps. On the other hand, there are turbo ultra hardcore greasy sweats that love failing a map 10,000 times in order to finally beat it and feel accomplished. I am personally on the baby boy side, and i do like challenges, but i agree with you on the point that chimps on expert maps is just waaaay too difficult, however, i understand why those types of challenges are in the game, considering the fact that NK has to strike a balance with their communities gap in skill.
Honestly I feel it would be more balanced if flame based tier 5s became immune to freezing. Like wizard lord pheonix or ring of fire for example, maybe even give gwen the ability to break out with her level 10 ability temporarily.
I would watch every. single. second. of that video discussing all the towers. Seriously, that sounds like so much fun. And, it gives me something to do for the long and potentially lonely summer months.
The amount of times where he admits that things have been fixed in this video alone is *insane.* Sure it was in the process of being written for a couple of months now, but a lot of the changes are still pretty big. Everyone at Ninja Kiwi is definitely *very* serious with this game, which I can't say for a lot of others that come out nowadays in general. I never in a million years would've thought that a silly money game about shooting balloons from a flash game you played in elementary school almost 20 years ago would turn out to have one of the most ambitious, dedicated, and respected developers of all time. Honestly the fact that they weren't even bought out by another company like EA is amazing and I hope it stays that way forever. Like seriously, they *still* push out content for games like BTD 5 despite being over 10 years old, and even BTD Battles 2 despite the playerbase after launch never recovering, and I *love it.* You'd think they would just abandon the games they have completed or didn't work out so well, but they always make sure to deliver a quality product no matter what. They even preserve their older flash games in a archive. I really wish more games and game companies were like this, they need to take notes. The only other one I can think of at the top of my head that even comes *close* to this level of commitment and quality is Nightdive Studios. I'm sure there's others like them, but ND and NK are the ones that easily stand out to me as absolute legends.
Tier 1 Bloonarius has the HP of two fortified double hp BFBs, and he comes in on round 40. Elite Bloonarius has the HP of a fortified double hp ZOMG, same round. And that's ignoring the adds he spams all over the map. Tier 3 Elite Bloonarius on round 80 has about as much health as an entire Impoppable game round 9-100, again with no adds. Anything else (outside of CHIMPS) is a joke compared to the elite bosses, really.
When you were talking about the bosses and their lack of variety during the initial release phase, one thing I love about their designs are they (except for Bloonairus) were designed to break up popular strategies, and force you to think differently per boss. Bloonarius was the testbed for Ninjakiwi. He's a boring boss, but he set the framework for what would become the boss battle system. And hey, sometimes that 70 ceramic rush on the first tier alone can end your game if you're not prepared. Then came Lych. Lych was unique in that it essentially forced you to ignore using any temporary/applied buffs, while passive auras (like jungle drums) and buffing heroes would be fine. This meant you could no longer just stack every buff imaginable on a single VTSG or tier 5 to win. You were also punished for selling towers while Lych was alive, meaning you couldn't just insta sell for emergency funds or ability spam. Vortex was next in line, and he was FAST. He was designed to counter chokepoints and killboxes. His wind blasts would remove permaspike shenanigans, and his lightning blasts would disable towers that relied on close range combat (like tack zone or super brittle), or sticking together to buff each other (like shinobi tactics and avatar of wrath). The slipstream boost also forced you to focus defending other lanes, as bloons that are not on the same lane as Vortex got the speed buff all the way through the entire lane. Dreadbloon got a massive overhaul, being resistant to entire categories at a time, and also getting flat damage reduction. This meant that towers that relied on low damage but fast fire rates like tack zone were basically useless, and even with a MIB, you still had to spread your money out across different categories unless you wanted the dreadrock bloons to run you down. The dreadrock bloons also taunt any tower with the strong targeting priority, meaning you couldn't just set towers to strong and focus Dreadbloon down quickly. You also had to deal with the adds. While Dreadbloon himself would practically never reach the exit, the consistent threat of his dreadrock bloon minions is a cause for concern. Phayze is a sort of combination of Vortex and Dreadbloon. You can't build a killbox as Phayze will just skip over it, and move the bloon spawn point past it. Additionally, its reality shield makes it quite durable despite its low raw HP. Additoinally, you need to rely on towers that can see camo property on their own, as radar jam destroys defenses that rely on camo detection buffs. If/when they bring back Blastapopoulos, I do wonder how they'll break up the meta yet again.
contested territories is fun, but it can get a bit frustrating when on a team of 15 players only one person does anything consistently , definitely not salty about that happening over and over and over
back when i had free time i used to play on two different accounts, on the same team, and it was very fun but exhausting because the ticket resets were at very bad hours for me
after listening to your intro talk, and before watching the whole video, i can definitely say already that you have not wasted any hours working on this, even if it is just scraps it's definitely a whole lot better than most other content on this sinking ship of a platform. thanks for the christmas enjoyment davey, and a happy holidays to you.
My experience with tower defense ganes begins and ends at WC3 mods from like 15 years ago. Watching this i feel like I'm peering into a forbidden realm where i am extremely lost. A lot of these screens feel like reading a dead language because of the speed and sheer amount of things going on...really makes me appreciate the different skill types that go into different types of games.
The upgrade system in btd 6 actually follows a noticeable pattern. Top path is like the 'natural path' with no special parts. The middle path is the active ability path The bottom path is the inactive ability path. By inactive ability, i mean basically a passive ability. For boomer, its the moab dom press separate to the kylie attack. For sub, its the pierce and damage buff to all nearby subs. So on so on
makes sense ! since the top and middle paths are (usually) the towers previous paths from btd5 (for example , boomer having glaive lord and turbo charge) and the bottom path is the new one , and the new path has to be different
I'd argue that the Sub is the opposite. If you were to follow that path, I believe the bottom path should be the top path as it barely changes the sub at all, while the top path gives you the ability to submerge, changing the idea of the sub entirely.
@@Pixelflame5826 yeah ive thought of that one before, but you could still make the argument that top path is the """logical progression""" of the sub and the commander buff is the passive
What I love the most is that you can make your own challenge in the game. For me, my favorite thing to do in the game is the 2 megapops challenge (2 million damage on 1 tower in chimps or around 98% of all pops). And for someone else, least cash runs on expert maps is the thing they enjoy the most. You really are only limited by your skill that also improves over time. And with the new map editor, there are a lot of new things for some part of the playerbase to enjoy too. Heres to hoping that they will add co-op to comunity maps some day. Sidenote: Love your planes name
As a relatively beginner player (lvl 81), my biggest problem is how fast the difficulty increases. Boss events require much different and specific strategies than anything that is experienced prior. It feels like theres only like 10 viable towers in boss events, and half of them are dedicated to getting money. The experimentation and variability of strategies that CHIMPS provides is completely stripped down in a boss event.
I still really need to go back and watch the RPGMaker vid. I specifically avoided it because I hadn't played Oneshot yet, but oops like a couple weeks after that vid i ended up doing beta testing for the console port of it as my first playthrough so that excuse is gone! lol
Hey, I do agree that the competitive rewards in this game should be changed, as I get top times in the races, seen at 1:32:15 with me at 13th place at the time of this video. I mainly play the race for the better position, and the medals on my profile, as I like speedrunning other games as well. If anyone's interested, I can get you a top time of you want, and learn some new stuff along the way!
What if instead of just adding Specialist Buildings and throwing the balance and difficulty for a loop, they instead function as a sort of optional replacement for heroes? You'd have to decide between placing down a hero that slowly levels itself or extra buffs to one or a few towers, balanced around the fact that you can't use the incredibly cost efficient heroes? These could also be differentiated from the Monkey Knowledge that essentially replaced them by allowing them to be used in CHIMPS mode, since you are replacing heroes for them.
As someone who’s also done just about everything there is to do in BTD6, I can confidently say it’s both the best tower defense game of all time as well as my favorite game of all time. (Ps: Heli Pilot’s are awesome!)
Amazing video, watched it half in 2023 and half in 2024. Hearing all your thoughts about this amazing game was more captivating than you'd expect. Really hope we get to see that video about every Tier 5 tower. Also, slightly pissed so the ending made me laugh uncontrollably for a bit. 💜
Love the video as always Mr. Gunface. A small note on the catapults launching pumpkins over pineapples as you expressed confusion on it around 1:25:30. I imagine that is influenced by the proud American tradition of Punkin Chunkin where every year around Halloween, people get together to show off medieval siege weapons launching pumpkins an absurd distance and giggling as they splat on the ground and seeing who can launch their pumpkin the furthest.
Honestly I really really want custom rounds for the game. Longer challenges feel really meh in BTD6 because youre still going through the same ish rounds. Odysseys have shown me being able to build specific rounds around tower weaknesses or interesting quirks... I feel that would make Hard BTD6 a lot more interesting.
1:26:13 As both a furry and a pedant, the politically correct term for cat humanoids would typically be catgirls, not furries (as furry has a specific technical definition as being a person who enjoys anthropomorphic characters, not the anthropomorphic characters themselves) but for non-anthropomorphised cat-eared bloons, they would fall under the global term of creatures with animal traits or animalized creatures (or animalized objects if you consider the bloons to be objects, but given the actions the bloons can take I would consider them to be sentient or pseudosentient creatures). Furthermore, I think the general use term would be catbloons or felinibloons, the pedantically specific term would be cat-eared bloons or cat-ear bloons and the most cursed term would be bloowoons (please never use this). All that being said, any of the terms I've mentioned so far, including both furries and catgirls would be acceptable in common use as they convey the meaning required. And no, I do not know why I put this much effort into this throwaway joke about an hour and a half into a two hour long video, barring the ASD of course.
Makes a damn near 2 hour video on BTD6, knows exactly what he’s talking about and very knowledgeable about the game, not an asshole about it, AND uses the pride flag for his monkey villages? Definitely earned a like and sub.
Ninja Kiwi is by far my favorite game developers, which isn’t a huge statement because I don’t play a ton of games, but they really are spectacular at making bloons the best game that it can be
35:53 I think a neat idea would be to have a support tower with either a path or entirely focused around not having a hero - buffing towers if there is no hero present. but saying that, that would be similar to just adding a purely support focused hero, with no attacks.
@@ttmfndng201 thinking about it more, I like the idea of a purely support hero, that can't attack - gameplay wise, it would be like not having a hero, and I think would be a cool workaround
@@FinnishArsonist This is why I always play Benjamin. I don't like building entire strategies around heroes, so the extra cash generated and support properties from him is nice. I just wish his cash generation wasn't completely outclassed by Geraldo.
I wanna say something. I never played Bloons TD. I never will, tower defense games are just not my cup of tea. Yet this video is so enjoyable to listen to. The way you delve into things, present them, there's just something enjoyable about it. Something that makes me watch and listen. I don't know what that is, some sort of combination between funny-to-informative, with the side of this very dead inside tone, can't put my finger on it. But ever since starcraft 2 videos i just can't get enough. Especially considering those sorts of videos also tackled the challenges that i found interesting. I just wonder what other turns this channel might take, because it really seems like you do this with anything.
21:10 I didn’t even realize pop and aw got nerfed, i just started using it a bunch, which is something I really like, I can grab a tower and upgrade path and then play with it a bunch, try it with different towers to see what it works well with, and eventually start using that different tower a bunch
This is the second best btd video I've ever seen it was a very entertaining video with some great ideas to improve the game but some of them just don't seem realistic like mod support on mobile is going to be a nightmare and the Xbox ver just won't be able to use it by that I mean all of the 7 people playing btd on Xbox
I'm just curious, did you play any of the Creeper World series for your tower defense reviews? It is one of my favorite series, though its more tower creep than tower defense.
The lack of incentive to play custom content and maps also hurts a lot. Also yeah, I hate expert map chimps and some advanced map chimps. It’s not fun having a massive choke that feels completely out of your control.
It's interesting to point out that the DDT actually originates from Bloons Monkey City, as do many of the boss bloons; that game's technically a spin-off, but it's also mechanically basically BTD5 adapted to be a mildly multiplayer game, and it did some pretty noteworthy things itself. Beyond those bloons, it's also the original progenitor of Monkey Knowledge, though that was a card-based system rather than how it exists in BTD6.
When you mentioned tower defence games with placable walls it made me think of SAS zombie assault td where placing walls is really important and demands a great amount of strategy.
Excuse me Bionic Boomerang triples the attack speed. You can play BTD6 without hero its possible but your severely handicapping yourself, as you mentioned Heroes given they level up over time makes them extremely cost effective. Not to mention map difficulty directly influences speed as to how Heroes level up.
Its actually 1984 that the description for Bionic Boomer states "The Bionic Boomer throws boomerangs twice as fast", but is actually three times as fast
A "Brief Review" Is perfect for the title, I do in fact enjoy watching 2 hour videos, so to not have to move to a different video and ruin the flow, just think it's funny that the video is not brief at all.
The only thing I want from btd6 is a monkey city variant like btd5 has. In monkey city you need special buildings to get t4 upgrades, so for monkey city 2 you could still need them, while also having the t5’s being a new tower, also would be great for paragons, and heroes, perhaps heroes have a lvl cap that you need to upgrade their building for? Idk it’s just super neat
I'm a consistent top 100 player with about 4000 hours clocked on this game. On the point of "heroes are always necessary" around the 35 minute mark, this is only true from the perspective of grinding the (currently) 172 map medals, which I know you said is what you consider to be '100%ing the game' (fair), but it's not true for every single game of BTD6. In competitive game modes, there are plenty of situations in where you don't use a hero if you want a good score. I regularly play CT tiles, boss events, and races where using a hero is suboptimal for one reason or another. It's usually because there's not enough rounds in the game to level the hero to a point where it's worth it (you see this lots in races and short CT LT games if the right towers are restricted) or in LC/LT bosses where every placement and upgrade matters and you're stuck with Striker Jones that week or something.
24:00 you GOTTA try out orcs must die 2/3 both are very fun and even though the barricade system can be incredibly powerful on some maps, the map design on a lot of the campaign levels specifically makes it either very difficult or straight up stupid to abise them
To fill in on contested territory (as a simple guide or something), the game is rather complex. On it, six teams of fifteen players compete for tiles on a map by beating specific challenges. There are three types of tiles: base tiles are quite easy to capture, usually just taking up to 50 rounds on an easier map; banner tiles are harder to capture, maybe peaking at round 6-95 on an advanced map with limited towers, but give more points for beating; and relic tiles are similarly difficult but give the team that captures them extra perks (such as all monkeys can pop leads or a team starts with more cash). It's a fun concept, but ends up extremely tedious. Contested territories last close to a week (I can never play every day, so I lose count). This wouldn't exactly be an issue, except the point scoring rewards playing every day. Every day, each player on a team gets 4 tickets. Attempting to capture a tile requires 1 ticket. Therefore, a single player can capture 4 tiles per day. Not exactly tedious, but frustrating for teams with inactive or fewer players. The issue arises with tile decline. Essentially, every tile you capture has a timer that runs from when you capture it. After a day of capturing it, the tile no longer earns a team points (every couple hours the tile will grant the team that owns it a certain amount of points based on what the tile is: default, banner, or relic). After another day, the tile becomes neutral again. Additionally, every four hours, I believe, the score on the tile downgrades, making the tile easier to capture. Here's an example: say I capture a race tile in 4 minutes and 10 seconds. After four hours, that time would become maybe 4 minutes and 30 seconds. After another four hours, it would be 5 minutes. And that continues until, by the time the tile will be neutral, the score was already so comically easy to beat it was essentially neutral either way. This ultimately makes contested territory tiles dependent on who captures it last or who captures it near when tiles grant points (on those intervals). It also forces players to continuously recapture the same tile every day with the limited tickets they have. Even to this day, I can remember a tile from months ago because I was the only person on my time who would attempt it. And I did, every day. That tile was a medium difficulty round 3 to 98 on Peninsula with only subs, druids, and engineer monkeys. Not exactly the most creative of tiles. As for the rewards, all contested territory rewards are either monkey money (and not much of it), insta monkeys, or specific to the contested territory shop. That shop consists of cosmetics in contested territory, like a banner for your team or a different base design to show to every team you play. It's very underwhelming for the time that contested territory requires. Overall, I would say the team-based gamemode has potential, and I really enjoy working with others to play to our strengths, but the repetition, tediousness, and lack of compensation always results in me not taking the final days seriously at all. I would like to see the mode reworked to reduce that (maybe instead of tiles giving teams a pool of challenges where each player on a team could attempt a certain number of challenges per day, and the best scores on each challenge would give that team points), but I also know plenty of people who enjoy its current state, so I don't see the mode being changed anytime soon.
Love the video, I do want to hear what your thoughts are on every single monkey in the game, but also would love to hear your thoughts over PvZ, one specifically. 2 and beyond you don't need to torture yourself with playing
As someone who has played this game for a less than a year and really enjoys it I don't have any problem with the rewards and progression system. I already have monkey knowledge maxed, I all tons of monkey money, a skin for almost every hero (I decided to not buy any from Psi yet because I feel like they are going to release a better skin for them). I don't play competitive and really am not into boss events and races that much, so that might be what's affecting my perspective Edit: Saw more parts of the video and now I notice that the problem isn't a lack of resources but how they are devided. It's extremely easy to get instas and monkey money, but even with that golden bloons, monkeys teams and competitive give terrible rewards, which is true. They need to balance it more, it's too easy to get monkey money with afk farming and too hard when using your brain and skill
I can't be bothered with so many events in the game, I have 600k monkey money saved up even though I spend it, completely free 2 play. The only thing I wanna do is black border instas and finish expert maps.
I havent even gotten to play BTD6 as my backlog is way too big to begin with, But honestly? Id watch a seven hour video about every tower. These games were my childhood and itd be dope to see where its at while i can still do other things
The thing is Custom Rounds would be good if there was any user interface to go "Hey, Round 90 contains (x), 91 contains (y)" and so on and so forth, even if it'd be a bit monotonous it'd still be infinitely better than the current system I do agree that the bar is set very low though, there've been a fair few odysseys that genuinely mess with everything I always wanted the game to mess with, but there are periods where they are just bland and like you said, five maps in a row with little to no changes
@@DaveyGunface oh for sure. It would be nice to just see what is happening on some sort of interface. There have been some odysseys in the past where it really hasn’t been an issue, eg. The BAD every 40 rounds one that was hinted at extremely clearly in the description of the odyssey, as well as one that just had a ton of early leads which also told you about that. But for more complex ones like that one you described as being “kaizo” (one I actually played and agree that it was pretty hard even for an odyssey), it would really help having more in-depth indicators. I don’t even recall if that one even hinted that it was basically accelerated rounds.
A very important extra bit regarding the rewards systems: coop gives basically nothing, even on the hardest maps and difficulties. This means you are actively encouraged to play alone instead of with friends.
