Game Breaker / Tower Defense

Game Breakers in Tower Defense games.

Games with subpages:

• Arknights
• The Battle Cats
• Kingdom Rush
• Path to Nowhere
• Plants vs. Zombies

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Other games

• While several towers in the Bloons Tower Defense games can be considered this when fully upgraded, the Super Monkey stands out: It starts out with pretty good range and it has upgrades that give it much bigger range. It starts off firing darts at a decent rate, but it can swap those darts out for laser beams that pierce bloons and pop frozen bloons. It can also swap those laser beams out for plasma vision, which fires twice as fast and can pop lead bloons.
  • The fourth game gave introduced an upgrade known as the Sun God, which fires 3 sun beams at a rapid rate, effectively tripling the efficiency of the tower. The 5th game gave that an upgrade: The Temple of The Monkey God, which can sacrifice the towers around it and absorb their powers. Its power can vary from being weaker than a regular Sun God to being powerful enough to single handedly destroy a Z.O.M.G. in seconds.
    • The 5th game also introduced 2 new upgrades on the right path after Epic Range. The 1st of those 2 is the Robo-Monkey, which has 2 arm cannons that can fire independently from each other, allowing the tower to target 2 different bloons at once. The 2nd of them is the aptly named Technological Terror, which fires its own special green plasma that is twice as powerful as the regular purple plasma while keeping the 2 arm cannons. It also has an activated ability where it sends out a short ranged shockwave that can destroy nearly any bloon in 1 shot.
  • Any of the fourth tier upgrades in BTD5 can become this when used right. One example of such is the Ray of Doom for the Dartling Gun, which shoots a constant solid beam of bloon destruction with a pop rate of 100 (formerly Infinite), practically killing any and all regular bloons in less than a second. The problem though, is that it is notoriously weak against MOAB-class bloons, since it only pops 1 per frame for those. Even so, a single one is still pretty effective against the M.O.A.B.s and B.F.B.s, but the Z.O.M.G.s are another story...
  • Another example is the Cripple MOAB upgrade for the sniper. What makes this one effective is its ablity to stun MOABs by hitting them. Its blimp stopping power depends on the strength of the blimps, but many later round strategies include entire armies of these.
    • In a similar sense, the Supa-Wide Funnel upgrade for the Bloonchipper. It makes the funnel huge enough to swallow blimps (even Z.O.M.G.s). It also has enough suction power to pull them into the funnel, where they get shredded for 500 damage.
  • When the Engineer updates hit BTD5, specifically it's specialty building, the game was made into a cakewalk. Tier 4 lends you access to the super sentry, which takes longer to build, but has firepower to melt Lead balloons. A single Engineer can land you 20 free rounds, and more with the foam upgrade (thanks to its specialty building's hidden effects making it a low-key spike factory). The sprockets upgrade can turn the tide and make the game even easier as those sentries now melt ceramics! The best part is that Engineers are cheap, which lends you access to more money, and thus you can build farms to make more money. Eventually you'll come to a point where money doesn't matter and you can either keep the Engineers, or sell them to make room for Super Monkeys. This singlehandedly makes the Engineer the 2nd best tower in this game, only next to a Sun Temple.
  • In the sense of money production, the Banana Farm. It can increase the amount of money per round that players get, while most of the upgrades increase its efficiency. Its bank upgrades actually stores it as interest until the player collects it. It can store up to $5000 money as a bank and $20000 money as an investments advisory.
  • Battles has 2 particularly noteworthy Game Breakers:
    • SIGNAL FLARE. For only $2000, the player has a tower that is able to completely remove Camoflauge protection from virtually all Bloons. This doesn't sound like a big deal, until you involve the majority of other towers in the game that are highly effective against non-Camo bloons but can't attack Camo bloons. The cost-effectiveness reaches the point where in combination with Ring of Fire, Signal Flare makes it VERY easy to bank for a screen-filling sell-rush with Rainbow Regens without losing a beat.
    • The aforementioned Ring of Fire (Tack Shooter's 4th left path upgrade) isn't any more fun to deal with. Ring of Fire, once it comes out, simply destroys every conceivable threat before Round 12 with no effort, allowing it to obtain economy with ridiculous safety. And it can be purchased as early as Round FOUR. Not helping is that the level before it, Tack Sprayer, is inexpensive for being very able to destroy Pinks, the strongest Bloons before Round 6, on its own.
• The Missiler Bots from Mini Robot Wars function similar to the Cattails from Plants vs. Zombies, but they cost only 50 energy, they can be placed on any platform and their missiles find another enemy if their current target is destroyed. They also have an upgrade that allows them to fire faster.
  • The Surveyor Bot can also be seen as this, because any mini-robot that is placed on it will be able to see camouflaged enemies. Naturally, Missliler Bots are commonly placed onto them.
  • The Atomic Bot's explosion covers the entire screen, dealing massive damage to all enemies on screen and completely depleting it of spikes in the Iron Fortress levels. An upgrade makes it powerful enough to kill a Giant in 1 shot.
  • Both place on upgrades for the Gunner Bot and Cannon Bot. The Gunner Bot gets a powerful gatling gun, while the Cannon Bot turns into a powerful Mortar Bot, which can fire Mini Bombers at any enemies infront of it. Of course, you only get these as the very last two upgrades in the game, right before the final levels.
• Bubble Tanks Tower Defense has the Mega-Tower, which is four towers rolled into one highly powerful weapon that functions depending on the towers that morphed into it. The MegaMega-Tower is four Mega-Towers rolled into one.
  • The second game had the "improved sell-back" and "cheaper ghost tower" upgrades, which allowed players to actually make a profit out of building and selling tier 1 ghost towers. Admittedly it takes ten iterations to afford a single basic tower, but since the game won't start until you let it, with a lot of patience and mashing the 2 and S hotkeys, you can garner a substantial early advantage.
• Cursed Treasure has the Chilling Crypt, which has a chance to scare the opposing "heroes" out of their wits, causing them to run away. The third charge experience upgrade gives it a third charge, massively increasing its chance of scaring the enemies. They also can be upgraded to have a chance of freezing an enemy on the spot.
  • Cursed Treasure 2 has the Shattering Crypt, which act like Chilling Crypts in the first but start out with three charges. However, it can be upgraded to deal damage over time to frightened "heroes", AND they also get an upgrade that gives them a small chance on instakilling "heroes" they hit (including Champions, but not bosses).
    • There's also the Lightning Crypt which fires at a much faster rate, each hit also having the instant-kill chance.
    • It's quite telling that the toughest level in the game only gives you two spots to place Crypts.
• The Gemcraft series has a concept known as supergems, which are specially constructed gems to maximize damage output for as cheap as possible. Such a construction is practically the only way to hold back enemies for all waves in endurance missions (Gemcraft 0 or Labyrinth). The exact construction differs among the different Gemcraft versions, but the most common method is combining a gem with another gem that's two grades lower.
  • In Labyrinth, there are two common tactics. First is using the Red Bloodbound gem, which increases damage based on a percent of total kills. Next is the Lime/Yellow combination, which hits multiple targets with a damage multiplier.
• mini Tower Defence gives an expert rating on score. It also provides an egregious example, as the easiest method to get expert is to hold down the "send now" key to bring all waves in at once, and use big bombs (leaving mop-up to just a single tower.)
• Onslaught 2 allows you to setup towers to create combination attacks. Earlier versions had a bug which allowed six nukes to be fired on the same frame, known as a nuke flower. While that is fixed, it was since replaced by careful construction of laser chains.
• Puzzle Defense has the "Eye of Ra" tower, which costs 200 gold to buy from Al Jezad's shop and 50 yellow runes to place onto the field. It only attacks ground towers, but it also has infinite range and damage, practically guaranteeing an easy game until the air units come. Unfortunately, it fires at an extremely slow rate.
  • Puzzle Defense is pretty unique for a tower defense game. It works like any regular tower defense game, but players only get currency by matching at least 3 runes of the same color in a row similarly to Bejeweled. This allows skilled players to get huge combos and gain vast amounts of game's currencies which they can use to place their towers down.
• Tower Madness has the flamethrower, which deals huge constant AoE damage to aliens that get near it. It upgrades make them deal even more damage. However, you need to use real money to buy it, and the Developers did an Obvious Rule Patch by introducing Ghost Aliens, who are immune to fire.
• SAS Zombie Assault Td has various final upgrades for the turrets and placeable extras, all of which can be pretty overpowering. These final upgrades must be bought for SAS dollars, however.
  • The Vickers Turret gets the Thundercat Gigashot upgrade, which is extreme even for gatling guns because it is able to fire one million bullets in a single minute!
  • The MLG Turret gains the Hand of Ra upgrade, which fires a powerful laser instead of launching explosives. The upgrade makes up for this by dealing insane amounts of damage to any zombies that it hits.
  • The Special Turret can become the "Liquid Clean" Tungsten Cannon, which rapidly fires blasts of heat that leave liquid tungsten on the ground. Only the toughest enemies will be able to withstand the tower's attack for more than a few seconds.
  • The MG SAS gets the M41-A Grendal, which has a huge range in addition to its high fire power and firing speed.
  • The Sniper SAS gets the M.A.D Systems One-Point-Oh, which fires very rapidly by sniper rifle standards and deals extreme damage per shot. It can even destroy the Ruin by itself if you freeze said zombie with a cryo grenade!
  • The razor wires become electrified, dealing massive damage to any zombies that step on them. This damage can be extreme if the zombies are stalled while on the electrified wires.
  • The sandbags can be turned into titanium barriers that can withstand far more abuse than the concrete Jersey Barriers before them.
  • Also for the TD spin-off is the Necro Nuke and the Necro Grenade, both of which explode in a huge radius, causing massive damage in that area. The only enemy that can survive the either weapon is the Ruin.
  • The Longbow Chopper and Typhoon Runner also exist in the same game. The former sends a helicopter that alternates between bullets and rockets at the zombies, while the latter sends 4 missle dropping planes in a straight line of your choice.
• In War Dragons, Chain Lightning and Fireball often turn into this if they aren't blocked by mage towers.
  • The dragon Darja in the same game. It was nerfed for being such a game breaker, and is still immensely powerful. It has Chain Lightning, (hits several towers in a row),Summon (summons a small warrior dragon to join the fight) and invert projectiles (turns projectiles back on the tower that launched them) spells and good health and power stats, along with storm tower resist.
• In some versions of Carrot Fantasy, there's a Mushroom powerup. It does mediocre damage while they are on levels 1 and 2, but they slow down enemies a bit. However, when you reach level 3, every hit on the enemies earn 2 coins aside from the usual cash you earn when they're defeated, and it has an insane range. Not to mention that the Mushroom weapon does splash damage!