Mobilize your squad of armored monkeys to take down a gauntlet of deadly balloons in Bloons TD 4.
Screengrab: Wired.com

I lost blurred, panicked hours to Flash Element Tower Defense in Twenty Aught-Seven. I defended my desk against creeping hordes of horrible creeps in Desktop TD version 1.0. I’ve defeated fleets of elite sheep-seizing freaks in Tower Madness, ignited flights of bike-riding sprites in Fieldrunners, beheaded and shredded treading and sledding undead in Plants vs. Zombies, flattened AT-ATs in Star Wars: Battle for Hoth, did something to some bug-like things with some other things in Pew Pew Land, and just generally burned out on the whole tower defense genre.

For a while I was even playing social farm games, for Bushnell’s sake! Social farm games! I never wanted to upgrade a missile tower again.

And then some primal primate-prizing urge led me to download Bloons TD 4 for iPhone, and I haven’t regretted a minute of it, or for that matter a 4-hour stretch of it. (I should point out that I haven’t played Bloons TD 1-3, but it’s just as well because this is clearly the apotheosis of the entire monkey-infused series.)

You are in charge of a theoretically endless army of armed monkeys. (Screw your space marines and night elves, that’s my escapist fantasy of choice.) Your task is to defend a patch of ground from the dreaded Bloon Incursion. (A “bloon,” I should point out, is for all intents and purposes a “balloon.” Except trademark purposes, I guess.)

Bloons parade mindlessly down predetermined paths, and you have to pop them before they get all the way across the screen. I’m not sure why it’s a bad thing if a bloon escapes, but I stopped questioning video game plots when someone pointed out that sexual harassment poster-ape Donkey Kong has no genitals.

As the old saying goes, you can’t pop the bloon unless you pay the monkey. The better simian armament costs big bucks, or possibly big bananas; the game isn’t entirely clear on the nature of monkey-bribery. So you try to spend currency wisely, staying one step ahead of your lighter-than-air enemy.

As you might gather from the description, Bloons TD 4 adds nothing completely original to the genre. The basic gameplay is the same as any number of tower defense progenitors. But like a jazz-master bringing new life to an old standard, or a Jazzercise-master making leg warmers fashionable again, Bloons TD 4 transforms the familiar into something fantastic. If, like me, you’ve wandered away from the tower-defending fold, this might be just the thing to bring you back.

WIRED Everything good about tower defense games, plus monkeys.

TIRED Very familiar gameplay. The art is merely cute.

Digital Goldfish, $2.99

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