Recent reviews by ECS

This is a fun little roguelike that's very simple to pick up and play, but its simplicity can also work against it. This review will have some focus on the negatives, but rest assured i did enjoy the game.

First, the game doesn't explain any of its mechanics. And while things like exploring and trying equipment are fun, figuring out the "basics" is not:
- Controls: Most controls are obvious enough, but Inventory (I), Stats (C) and locking items (C in inventory) were hard to figure out. Also, blocking and using special ability are bound to the same input, but it's not clear what decides which of them is triggered. Only after 4 full runs i found out that attacking an enemy causes the ability to "recharge".
- Stats: There's absolutely no explanation about stats, they're just a name and a number and nothing more. Things like HP and Damage are obvious enough, but i don't see how one can figure out things like Proc, Cleave, Smite or Deathstrike without a guide. It's also not clear how they affect things, like how each stat boosts the damage of specific weapons.
- Equipment: It's standard RPG knowledge that the rarity order of equipment is usually Gray > Blue > Purple > Orange > Red. But this game also has Pink, Green and Cyan, and it's not clear where they go in the hierarchy. Even after 5 runs on the game i'm still not sure. Also, some high tier equipment have more stats than the stats box can show them, so some of their stat changes are not shown, making it harder to choose between equipment when you don't know their full effects.

The story doesn't seem like it was supposed to be a focus. The plot explains our goal, but there's no further development of it during the game. Once it ends, we instantly start in a New Game+ run. Any piece of dialogue only happens when interacting with NPCs or bosses, but none of them seem relevant at all.

Character progression is based entirely on stats, which increase via levelling up, stat boosts and wearing equipment.
Equipment drops from enemies or chests, which are found in the overworld, as reward from bosses or "puzzles", bought in caves and secret item stashes. Equipment has tiers and levels. Tier defines quantity and which stats can show, while level defines the value of the main stat, and scales with player level.
There is a good amount of different character builds, and many ways to get strong in the game, and it's fun to experiment around.

One problem i have with equipment is that drop rates are heavily in favor of weapons. This might sound good at first, but your weapon is only as good as your stats can boost it, there's no point in finding 100 strong weapons if you can't find a Boot/Cape/Ring to match. This is especially troublesome with top tier equipment:
Red tier only drops in the last dungeon, or from a very rare enemy. Cyan tier only drops from the last boss. That means you get one or two of each per run. After 5 runs, i got 7 Cyan and 7 Red pieces, which were 11 weapons, 2 amulets and 1 Ring. So from all 14 top tiers i got, i only kept 3 of them. There's also a cave where you can buy chests, and it's a pain to waste money just to get multiple weapons from it.

The exploration is pretty good! The game has a Zelda-inspired overworld divided in individual screens. There is a minimap you can follow, but no full map available. The map is always the same, so it pays off to explore and get familiar with it. Your goal is to beat 6 dungeons to reach the Dark World and the final dungeon. There are caves to explore, item locations to find and secrets to uncover! I fully explored the map in all 5 runs, and had a lot of fun!
The puzzles are disappointing though, they basically boil down to "press this button on the floor to unlock stuff", and require no actual "solving".

Then, the fighting... The game uses an auto-attack mechanic, no input is needed to attack, just walk to the enemy and you attack automatically. That is basically the extent of fighting. There is a little depth added with blocking (negates damage, but you can't attack) and special abilities (effect depends on weapon), but you never need to use them, just walk until the fight is over.
There's also ranged weapons that you need to click to attack, and consume stamina, but i never used them so i can't comment. Speaking of stamina, it is only used for ranged attacks and for blocking. In all 5 runs i never used or cared for stamina.

The enemy variety is decent, each area or dungeon has a few different enemies. Some are unique, and some are reskins of other enemies. Enemies have a set range and attack at regular intervals. They can be melee, ranged or use weapons.
And then there's the bosses, gigantic creatures with higher health, higher damage and a variety of unique attacks. They stay in the middle of their room and only start the fight when approached.

The bosses sound like they'd be the biggest threat in the game, but they weren't at all. They never gave me trouble and never killed me, even though enemies killed me a lot. At first i didn't understand why, but then i did some tests, and found something interesting: I decided to stand still and let the bosses attack, and their attacks quickly became overwhelming! So i figured it out. The reason the bosses were so easy was the auto-attack mechanic: Everytime an enemy takes damage, it flashes and gets stunned for a split second. As long as we attack constantly, the enemy is essentially stunlocked. This makes boss encounters trivial, as they're always 1v1 and can be permanently stunlocked, meanwhile with enemies, one will be stunlocked while the others can keep attacking you.
This takes the saying "The best defense is a good offense" to the next level, and makes the bosses rather disappointing with how unbalanced the auto-attack is.

As for survivability, HP is based on the Constitution stat, and the only way to recover it is via Potions (drop from enemies or crates, used immediatelly, heals ~40% HP), Campfires (save point, heals full HP), Regen stat (chance to activate when you get hit, heals ~10% HP) and Lifesteal stat (chance to activate when you attack, heals ~10% HP).
Healing is also kinda unbalanced. The drop rate for potions is very low for normal enemies and crates, but in dungeons, revisiting a cleared room spawns purple beasts that drop potions very often. This makes healing trivial inside dungeons, but difficult otherwise.
The game has a permadeath mechanic, you lose everything and start from level 1 (even after NG+ runs). However, there's also a twist, tied to the lore: At the start, an NPC gives you a Soul (blue heart), which grants +1 life. That allows you to keep your progress when you die, at the cost of losing the soul. But you can go back to the place you died and recollect it, which essentially allows you to have infinite lives. I found this to be a good twist on the permadeath, especially with how easy it is to die in this game.
As far as i've played, it seems there isn't a point you can become immortal in this game (Except maybe a full Regen build, i didn't get that far). The enemy power scales with your level, as you get stronger, so will everything around you. High tier equipment makes your life easier with stronger stats, but the danger never disappears. Even at level 200+ with a full Red/Pink/Cyan build, it takes merely a few hits for me to go from full HP to dead.

Overall, i had fun with what the game had to offer. It is a short game, each run took 2h to complete 100%, which is fair for the asking price. I think i achieved everything i could in this game in these 5 runs. The only thing left for me would be a full Red/Cyan build, but the grind for that is way too excessive.
Despite the negative tone of some parts of the review, i did enjoy the game, and i would recommend it as something to quickly pick up and play for a short time.

As much as i love Ninja Kiwi games and i've had a lot of fun with this game, i simply cannot recommend it for one reason: It's not called BTD5 or BTD6.
What do i mean with this? Simple.
Any Ninja Kiwi game that's not BTD5 or BTD6 is destined to be completely ignored by the developers and become obsolete in no time. In fact, this game has been released on Steam in 2020 and as far as i know it hasn't received any update since release. And even more, the Steam version is a port of the mobile version of Bloons Monkey City, which was already dead on updates long before the Steam version was even released.

But well, maybe the game is already on a "complete state", so it doesn't need to get anymore updates, right? Well, kinda...
If we ignore the fact that the Flash version had a lot more content than the Mobile version (such as a hardcore mode and an entire second city), then yea, content-wise the game does seem complete.
However, the game also hasn't gotten any bugfix updates, and along many of the bugs i've seen people talking about, there's a pretty major one called the Contested Territory/Beacon bug, which makes the Contested Territory have 2x difficulty for some players, making it impossible for them to win. I've been affected by that myself.

So, if we ignore the lack of updates and the bugs that won't be fixed, is the game good? Well, yes, but also no.
I mean, i've played this game on 3 different versions: Flash, Mobile, and now Steam, so it is doing something right. But unfortunately that does not last long.
The concept of the game is a curious mix, the well known Bloons Tower Defense formula combined with a city building simulator. Surprisingly, that works pretty well... at the start. Every tile we capture has us playing a BTD match against bloons of a certain strength, and the city building part allows us to get more towers and research more upgrades.

At the start, progress goes nicely, we can get new upgrades often, getting stronger and stronger as we play. The tiles start off easy, with only weak bloons, and then start to have longer rounds and stronger bloons as we go. One thing i really like about this game is how the bloon rounds are always varied (unlike in BTD5 where the rounds are predefined).

However, going past a certain point, things change completely.
As far as tiles go, i feel like we reach the endgame way too early. The game has a total of 3000 tiles to capture, but after around 300 of them, all we have left are ZOMG tiles, so we're essentially always playing full BTD games after that. The difficulty also takes a sharp increase later on, while we have to ever so slowly build our way by getting more towers and better upgrades.
Also, most of the Special Missions are available pretty early on, so once you reach the ZOMG tiles you've basically seen everything. The late-game itself suffers from some serious lack of content, unless you just want to keep grinding neverending ZOMG tiles.

And on the city building side, it seems like the game is trying its hardest to not allow us to play, while simultaneously wanting us to play all the time. Everything we build or research takes time to complete, time that we need to wait before we can click the building to complete it.
How long? Well, most tower buildings take 5 to 30 minutes. Tier 1/2 upgrades usually 15 minutes to 2 hours. Then for tier 3 upgrades, we're looking at a minimum of 20 hours to complete, and tier 4 upgrades can take anywhere from 1 day up to 8 days! (While also requiring special buildings that take more time to build)
Along with that, we also need to collect cash. The farms will always produce cash (even when the game is closed), but only up to 1 hour, so if we wanna have more cash, we need to open the game to collect it.

By the time i reached level 20, getting cash and waiting for buildings to finish is basically all i do on this game. And even if i could have fun with just building and decorating my city, that requires lots of cash and space, both things i won't be able to spare until much later...

Oh, the game also has microtransactions, allowing you to buy bloonstones, Monkey Knowlegde packs, the monkey farmer and a lot of decorative buildings. Why is this relevant to the review? Well, because the game thinks it is relevant, as every so often it will show pop-ups reminding us that we can buy stuff with real money.
But i wouldn't really call it "pay to win", nah. You pay to get a slight boost, then it's back to the grinding.

All in all, i know Ninja Kiwi games are known for grinding (and some for being pay to win). And if i'm still here, it's because i enjoy the grinding. But from all of them, i think Bloons Monkey City is one of the least satisfying to grind.
I've replayed the first few hours because the early-game is quick and fun, but on all 3 times i played it, i've always stopped by level 20-ish.

Oh, honorable mention. All things considered, this game has possibly the best soundtrack in all of Ninja Kiwi! I could legit just start it and let a tile play just to listen to its tunes, so that's definitely worth checking out!

Amount of hours says enough really.

Also, it's still consistently getting updated!

This game is really cool!
I've been a fan of the Learn to Fly series for a long time, ever since i played Learn to Fly 2 on kongregate in 2012!

This game is an awesome addition to the series, being quite a new experience in terms of theme, having a upwards launching theme instead of the usual side launching one. This change makes the gameplay quite different, which is cool in some points, and not so much in others.

Pros:
- Free to play! (there are in-app purchases, but everything can be achieved without those)
- Loads of content! And a nice amount of replay value!
- Lots of different equipments and upgrades
- Many new unlockable equipments
- Bonus Shop to research extra upgrades that affect most thing is the game
- 4 different gamemodes
- Lots of customization!
- Cool soundtrack! Highly customizable too!
- A lot of achievements to get
- Good for both casual players, if you just wanna have some fun, as well as going a bit hardcore, trying to find the best strategies to finish the game quickly
- 6 saveslots, so you can keep different games active or try for different achivements
- Humor! It's always nice!
- Lots of fun! It's Learn to Fly!
- DUBSTEP DRIVE!!! THE BEST EQUIPMENT IN THE GAME!!

Cons:
- No gliding
- Highly dependent on upgrades to get further, unlike the previous games in the series
- Some grinding involved, depending on what you wanna achieve (Bonus Shop being the longest, though maxing out everything in it is completely unecessary)
- Classic mode is pretty meh, since it still keeps the same mechanics as the other modes

Overall a really great game! totally recommended!
It does add a lot of new things, and is a lot more polished than previous installments! And while the change in theme isn't as enjoyable as the previous games (especially the 2nd one) because of the lack of gliding, it still has improved enough to be, in my opinion, the best game in the series so far!