Bloons Is The Perfect Recipe For A Card Game (2024)

Bloons has a storied history among zoomers and millennials, starting as a browser-based Flash series in 2007 in which monkeys popped bloons with darts to earn points. In classic web game fashion, it was incredibly straight forward, making it all the rage with school kids bunking off class while the teacher wasn’t looking, but Bloons has evolved so much in the nearly two decades since it graced our laggy school Wi-Fi.

That same year, Tower Defense launched, finally putting some meat on the monkey bones as you were now tasked with surviving as long as possible against an onslaught of bloons as you earned increasingly powerful monkeys. It cemented Bloons as one of the most iconic Flash games of all-time, spawning a series that is still thriving today with five sequels as Ninja Kiwi moved into the lucrative world of mobile and Steam.

But keeping a series like Bloons fresh is a challenge. Deviate too much from that simple, core premise and you risk alienating nostalgic fans who return time and time again to hold down the fort against an army of zeppelins and gasbags. But like the PvP strategy game TD Battles in 2012, Ninja Kiwi has once again cracked the code in Card Storm.

This upcoming Bloons game pits player against player, each using a custom built deck of cards that depict familiar monkey towers from the Superman ‘riff to the plain dart shooters, and all the bloons we’ve spent years popping. Rather than defending lanes against an oncoming stream of helium-filled rubber, you fill your own lane with bloons that are then hurled at your opponent after so many turns. But they can place up to five towers using their cards that can attack enemy bloons on their turn. Are you sick of the word bloons yet?

Unlike Tower Defense, if a bloon gets through, it doesn’t deal full damage. Each bloon has health, and whatever that number is by the time it hits you is how much damage you take. So, even if you don’t destroy a MOBA as it hurtles towards Quincy, you can at least knock it down a couple hundred points to survive the blow. It’s an incredibly interesting take on the nearly 20 year old formula, retaining what makes Tower Defense so special, while adding a more strategic spin.

Even though so many Bloons fans who started playing the series in 2007 are now adults (hello!), the series is still clearly aimed at kids. Card Storm is vibrant and colourful with a simple, Flash-like art style, iterating on TD6 rather than reinventing the wheel, but card games involve a lot of moving parts. Here, more than most.

There are lanes that you have to defend against, and you only have five slots for towers—these can be swapped out, but the lower limit makes synergising vital. Throw in deck building, hero abilities, and the Storm mechanic which churns out random bloons onto each lane at the start of every turn, and it all sounds a bit complicated for the school kids who latched onto Bloons in the first place. In practice, however, it’s surprisingly intuitive.

There’s a four-part, optional tutorial that guides you through the mechanics in under half an hour. I’m not normally one for tutorials—I’d much rather get frustrated figuring it out for myself—but this was a welcome, breezy crash course on everything you need to know that gets you up to speed and ready to play in no time. Before long, I was trying out the campaign and fighting other, real opponents, winning matches with my hodgepodge deck as I found most cards to be completely viable.

It leverages everything you’ve learned from TD5 and TD6 to make the card element feel like a natural evolution—it’s second nature from the off. You know what these bloons do, you know how powerful each tower is, the cards are merely a vehicle to get them onto the board this time. Once you’re in the thick of a match, it’s like stepping back into 2012 and fighting an opponent in TD Battles. But being able to fine-tune your approach with a custom deck makes it so much more personalised and opens the door to far more experimentation with builds and metas that will keep matches fresh years from now.

My only major concern with Card Storm is the sheer number of crafting materials. In the preview, I had a whole bunch of cards already unlocked, but looking through my collection, there are ten different currencies used to craft them. There are Exotic Power Tokens, Advanced Bloon Tokens, Military Monkey Tokens, and so many more that are all incredibly niche and sound as ridiculous as each other. Knowing how complex TD6’s optional extra content grew, I’m wary of what building a deck will look like in the release build when you don’t have all the cards at your disposal.

There’s a shop that isn’t currently open yet, so I can’t see what it sells, but it already has me anxious. In TD6, you can upgrade your monkeys with Monkey Knowledge, which requires Knowledge Points and Monkey Dollars. These can be earned in-game, or you can buy them outright with real money (for example, ten points is £7.99, and there are 134 possible upgrades). The shop in TD6 sells currency for real money, so the shop in Card Storm will likely follow suit, but I’m not sure yet what Monkey Dollars will be used for—upgrades, like with the Monkey Knowledge? Or the cards themselves?

Hopefully, the monetisation is a little tamer in Card Storm, because it’s already a time sink in TD6 to get the required materials to bolster your army of monkeys. When you’re facing real opponents who have splashed out to get the good cards, things might start to feel a bit unfair when you’re left grinding for the basics.

Card Storm’s gameplay loop, however, is brilliant. It’s intuitive, takes the Tower Defense formula in an interesting and bold new direction, and freshens up a 20 year old series with all the charm of the Flash era still heartily intact. It’s a promising sign for the next step in Bloons history, and since it’s launching on mobile, the age-old tradition of sneakily playing a game at school can continue.