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.