Ah... flash games... Some of them suck and some of them are pretty good. Most of them suck though. In fact, nearly all of them suck. Which category does Bloons fall into you may ask? Well, read on to find out.
Bloons is a simple game. You play as a monkey high up in the clouds throwing darts at balloons. The game is broken into many stages, each with its own set amount of balloons you must pop and a set number of darts with which to do it. After awhile, different types of balloons are introduced that do special things, such as bomb balloons that explode and take out all nearby balloons, or freezing surrounding balloons in ice, making them unpopable and totally screwing things up. Its a game of simple, nonsensical fun that you will either get hooked on or bored of immediately.
Controls are very basic, utilizing only the mouse. Take aim by moving the mouse, and hold down the left mouse button to charge your shot. Holding it longer will result in a straighter, more powerful show, but holding it down too long or too briefly will cause the shot to curve and plummet quickly. With no time limit, this game is completely centered around making well thought out, precise shots to take out as many balloons per shot as possible.
I get the feeling that Ninja Kiwi (the creator of this game) is a Peggle fan. Like Peggle, many of the puzzles in Bloons rely on angling your shots just right to get around the various obstacles that protect your helium-filled prey. The physics are impressive. Changing your shot's angle or power even slightly will produce a noticeably different dart trajectory. Although you will lose constantly, rounds go so fast that this isn't too much of a setback.
While they weren't anything too major, I noticed a few flaws in this game pretty early on. The biggest one would definitely have to be the difficulty. Stages constantly go back and forth from laughably easy to frustratingly difficult. The general rule of design is that a game should get progressively more challenging as you advance. Bloons does not. While this doesn't make the game unplayable, it did seriously tick me off to go, for example, right from a puzzle I could solve in one move to a puzzle that required incredible precision and took me a good 10 minutes to solve. In some cases levels were so easy that they were almost impossible to fail at. Another issue I had was what seemed to be some minor glitches every now and then that would cause the darts to act strangely. This happened particularly often with the bouncy black tiles. Again, while this in no way ruined the game, it sometimes caused me to mess up on high-precision shots.
As for sound and graphics... well, don't expect anything amazing. It IS a free game after all, and seems to have been developed by a very small team, if a team was even used at all. The art is passable. Nothing amazing but nothing horribly jarring either. As for the sound, pretty much the same thing. You get your standard bleeps and bloops. If I had to pick a favorite sound effect, I guess it would be the sound of the balloons popping. Thats sort of appropriate since it is the sound you are going to hear most often. Something I really would have liked to see included would have been some sort of volume control. As someone who likes to play with music running in the background, the ability to turn the sound effects down a bit would have been really nice. It seems like something you would just expect to be in the game and I was really disappointed that it wasn't.
This is the kind of game that you will either become immediately hooked on or immediately bored of. To be perfectly honest I got bored pretty quickly. There just wasn't anything really new to see here. The Bloons game is one part Frozen Bubble and one part Peggle. Does that make it better than the two? Or even as good as them? Nope. You'll have more fun with either of those games. That doesn't mean Bloons is completely without its merits. Simple and repetitive though it may be, there are countless levels for you to play through and its also one of the most played free online games available. It would probably take an entire day or two of nonstop playing to get through all of the stages the main game and various level packs have to offer. If you find yourself enjoying this game, you'll be in heaven.
