Bloons Super Monkey is a top-down aerial Shoot 'Em Up series by Ninja Kiwi.
The first one's plot is pretty simple. You are a Super Monkey, and you are stopping an attack by the Bloon Empire.
The sequel features a much more advanced Tech Tree, consisting of attacks for both arms AND an additional one for the core. There are several branches: Dart, Boomerang, Explosives, Magic, and Tech.In addition to that, there are also Research upgrades that can bring out more power to your arsenal and Epic Powers, which are special abilities you can toggle on and off in the Upgrades menu.
In both games, you collect Power Blops, used to buy upgrades. However, in the sequel, they are converted to Blop Cash so you can buy upgrades.
A mobile game has been released, and is the first mobile Ninja Kiwi game to feature 3D models instead of sprites. It adds Storm and Ice paths to the tech tree, and features a lot more levels and bosses.
Bloons Super Monkey provides examples of:
- Ad Reward: Mobile 2 has the option to watch an ad to double blop gain or provide an instant blop reward.
- Advancing Boss of Doom: All the bosses in the sequel. If they get through, you'll instantly lose the stage!
- Arm Cannon: The Explosives and Tech branches in the sequel provide you with one if it's on the arms.
- Astral Finale: Stage 5 in the original game takes place in outer space.
- Awesome, yet Impractical: Many in the second game.
- It may seem awesome at first to have arms that can spew out constant flames, but unfortunately the damage output is outclassed by all other types of attacks.
- Super Monkey Jr. is the most expensive upgrade in the game by far, yet is also one of the weakest. The damage done by an extra ally whose attacks are half as strong as yours don’t measure up to the killing power of something that can stun or wipe out all bloons on screen.
- The Bomb path in 2, at least without research. It's weakness is set to Black and Zebra Bloons, but since every Bloon above a Black spawns them in some form (Leads spawn blacks, Glasses spawn Zebras, and Ceramics spawn Rainbows, which also spawn Zebras), so they might as well be weak to everything.
- The bomb plane powerup suffers from the above problem, as well as its high damage to bosses also being neutered by the fact that you can’t even have this active or long enough to reach the boss.
- Badass Adorable: The Super Monkey is a cute little monkey in a superman suit, who also happens to be able to harness Enormous bombs and death lasers.
- Bandit Mook: The sequel introduced U.F.O. Bloons. Green ones will steal uncollected blops that appear under them. Purple ones seal blops directly from you. You can retrieve these by killing them.
- Boss in Mook Clothing: Mini-M.O.A.B.s, at first. Once you get Doom Burst Vision, they become FAR less of a problem.
- Bullet Hell: Subverted. Bosses often fire a ridiculous amount of shielded bloons in the sequel, but they can't damage you. They CAN
push you around, however.- Played straight with Spikey Chaos in the Sequel.
- Also played straight in the mobile version of the second game with Bloptonite, which reduces your speed if you touch it. The more you run into, the slower you get. As you can probably guess, slowing down due to touching bloptonite tends to make you run into even more of it.
- Close-Range Combatant: Several of the weapons in the sequel have a limited range, but to compensate for it they deal incredible damage. Examples are the Tech weapons' whips, the Magic weapons' flamethrowers and ring, and such.
- Combat Tentacles: The boss of stage 3-5. It's based off of a squid, and can protect itself with its tentacles.
- Cool Plane: The Epic Powers for the Dart and Explosive branches on the arms both summon this.
- Crippling Overspecialization: The player is encouraged to bring in different attacking types, since there's a Bloon that resists each attacking type (Darts and Boomerangs v.s. Lead Bloons, Explosives v.s. Black Bloons, Magic v.s. Ceramic Bloons, and Tech v.s. Glass Bloons). Players who specialize in one type will require extensive research to be able to affect the Bloon weakness, and even then, with greatly reduced power.
- Degraded Boss: In the sequel, the M.O.A.B first appears as the boss of Monkey Lane. Several of them later appear in 2-5 and 3-5, as normal enemies.
- The B.F.B first appears as the boss of Bloon Dunes. Another one appears in 3-5 as a normal enemy.
- Dual Wielding: You can have different gear for each arm.
- Early Installment Character-Design Difference: In the first two games, Super Monkey has dark skin and black eyes, with his suit also lacking shading. The second game's mobile version instead makes him have light skin, more standard eyes, and actual shading on his suit. The original design is available as the Retro skin, though.
- Energy Weapon:
- In the original, Laser Vision, Triple Twin Lasers, and Death Ray Vision, along with Plasma Tentacles, and their upgrades.
- The sequel gives us a Tech branch on the Tech Tree, devoted to this. It's very powerful against most things overall, unfortunately, it's stopped short by Glass Bloons.
- Not only can you use lasers whips in the sequel, but you can also shoot them out of a visor over your eyes!
- Elite Mooks: The Mini-M.O.A.B.s.
- Fireballs: The magic branch in the sequel gives us this for the arms. However...
- Fire-Breathing Weapon: ...The later upgrades swap out the fireballs by turning your arm weapons into a rapid stream of constant actual flames!
- Flawless Victory: Earning a Diamond medal for a stage requires you to pop every single bloon.
- Forced Level-Grinding: In the sequel, you often have to play levels several times to get enough Bloops to be powerful enough to go to the next level.
- Gatling Good: In the sequel, the arm dart upgrades go to miniguns, and a Power-Up gives you one of the most badass weapons ever: a gigantic Gatling gun firing THREE pulses of Spike Balls of Doom EVERY FRAME and wrecking everything in its way.
- Giant Spider: One of the Bloon formations in the sequel's stage 5-2. You initially see their webs, including some of the Sand Worm enemies from the previous level trapped inside them, and then you face them for real. At one point they even trap you in a web made of Shielded Glass Bloons!
- Giant Squid: One of the bosses in he sequel looks like Cthulhu's face stretched over a blimp, and has a Bloon formation resembling a squid with tentacles. It is not gonna go down without a fight if the player doesn't put extensive effort in upgrading weapons and research.
- Gratuitous Ninja: The last few upgrades on the Boomerang branch in the sequel involve ninjas. One of the Power Ups summons two ninjas and turns you into one. Oh, and an Epic Power calls in THREE more ninjas that hop around from bloon to bloon that deal huge damage!
- Humongous Mecha: The final boss of the sequel? A GIANT ROBOTIC BLOON!
- "Instant Death" Radius: The core upgrades on the Magic branch so this.
- Invincible Hero: Super Monkey is immune to the Bloons and cannot be hurt. However, he can still fail if he fails to pop the required amount of Bloons for the level.
- Kryptonite Factor: Super Monkey is immune to the Bloons, but the Bloons in the Mobile version can produce "Bloptonite", green blops that if collected, will gradually slow down the affected Super Monkey to a crawl unless they switch out.
- Kung Fu-Proof Mook: Several bloons require more strategy than "just shoot at it". Various Bloon types are flat-out immune to certain weapons unless you have the research against them. Shielded Bloons have a lot of health and push Super Monkey around. Phasing Bloons can only be harmed when they're not "phased".
- Last Lousy Point: In the sequel, diamond medals are earned by popping all of a level's bloons in one playthrough of said level, meaning that any stray bloons getting through can be this.
- Ledge Bats: Shield Bloons cause knockback when they collide with the player. A LOT of knockback.
- Lethal Lava Land: The Volcano stage in the original, and the Mt. Magma stage in the sequel.
- The volcano levels in BSM2 Mobile are advertised as this, yet sadly don't have a matching level background.
- Limit Break: BSM2 gives you Epic Powers once you unlock the 6th tier upgrade of a weapon. This function similarly to activated abilities in Bloons Tower Defense 5 and each one can be activated for heavy bloon destruction with a mouse click. You can equip one for the "core" and one for each arm like regular weapons, but your epics can be of different types than the active weapons. However, it's rather difficult to control which one to use when because each click simply activates the first available epic regardless of it being a core or arm epic.
- The Mobile version solves the above drawback of epic powers by placing the button for each individual epic below your super monkey. While using them can prove difficult at the bottom edge of the screen, it' still better than being forced to use epics you don't need yet just to get to one you currently do need.
- Logical Weakness: Most of your weapons have a pretty logical reason to be ineffective against certain Bloon types.
- Darts and Boomerangs are ineffective against Lead Bloons because Lead Bloons are, well, metal, and require high energy weapons to penetrate the shell.
- Magic is useless against Ceramic Bloons thanks to most of the spells being fire- or lightning- based, while ceramic clay is very heat resistant and a terrible conductor of electricity. The research that allows Magic to even harm ceramics is some form of earth manipulation.
- Glass Bloons are immune to the light-based tech attacks thanks to being transparent and reflective.
- This leaves the illogical or unexplained bloon immunities as black/zebra bloons vs. bombs and white/zebra bloons vs. ice (the latter is more obvious on Mobile due to proper ice-based weaponry existing there).
- Macross Missile Massacre: One of the Power Ups in the sequel puts you in the cockpit of a yellow jet that constantly fires Bloon Buster missiles, Cartoon Bombs, and M.O.A.B. Maulers.
- Also in the sequel, the Sidewinder Ace ability sends out an airplane that constantly fires Bloon Busters.
- Metal Slime: Golden Bloons, which move around very quickly and take several hits to pop, but drop valuable golden blops and a power-up.
- Mook Maker: In the sequel, EVERY boss does this!
- More Dakka: The aforementioned mega-minigun from the sequel.
- Not-Actually-Cosmetic Award: Each achievement earned gives a small blop reward.
- No-Sell: In the sequel, Black Bloons knock explosives away, Lead Bloons bounce darts, spike balls, boomerangs, glaives, shuriken, sai, and katana, Ceramic Bloons resist magic attacks, and Glass Bloons reflect laser beams, laser pulses, plasma blasts, and doom bursts. However, these can be countered by research... but at its maximum, it only allows every 7th shot to be able to affect the corresponding Bloon weakness.
- Permanently Missable Content: Two hidden achievements in the mobile version. Big Spender requires you to buy a whole tree of upgrades all at once (which you can’t do if you already bought the first upgrade of every tree), and Precision requires you to get the exact number of pops required to get a Bronze, Silver, or Gold medal (but if you’ve already gotten the medal for a certain level, you can’t go for the achievement on that level). The game won’t tell you about these achievements, and Precision is nearly impossible to get later in the game except by getting extremely lucky.
- Person of Mass Destruction: While the Super Monkey was always portrayed as such in the Tower Defense games, these games portrayed him as the Ninja Kiwi verson of Chuck Norris.
- Power-Up: Occasionally, in the original, these will appear. In the sequel, Golden bloons will drop these along with blops when popped.
- The original's Power Ups are: Sun God, Super Bomb, and Freeze-Out.
- The sequel's Power Ups are: Spike Ball MiniGun, Ninja Saboteur, MOAB Mauler Airship, Wizard Lord, Technological Terror, and Sun God. The first five have a weakness to certain bloon typesnote , while the last can pop any bloon with ease.
- Power Up Let Down: In the sequel, with the exception of Sun God, any powerup can become this if you have higher tier equipment, depending of the types of bloons on the screen.note
- Precision-Guided Boomerang: Averted. The boomerangs do come back around, though.
- Recursive Ammo: The Fletchette Darts upgrade in the sequel makes darts shatter into smaller darts on impact. Also, the Thermite Munitions upgrade is the same, but they come out of bombs and missiles. Thermite Chunks also does this, except with Pineapples.
- Sand Worm: One of the Bloon formations in the sequel's stage 5-1, they burst out from the top or the sides of the screen and block a good chunk of it. They're primarily made of Black Bloons, meaning that explosives don't hurt them much. And then come stage 5-2, and you see said worms trapped in the webs of Bloon Spiders...
- Scissors Cuts Rock: Normally, certain weapons are completely ineffective against a specific type of Bloon. However, Research allows every X shot of said weapon category to affect their corresponding Bloon weakness, where X decreases as research levels increase.
- Sequential Boss: The final boss of the sequel changes its attack patterns at different health stages. At 100% and 25%, it has two giant axe blades and buzz saws. At 75%, there is a shield around the bottom and two antennae that shoot out streams of bloons. At 50%, there are the buzz saws combined with the bloon-guns.
- Sorting Algorithm of Threatening Geography: The first game's stages are in the following: a forest, a jungle, a snowy land, a volcano, and space.
- Smart Bomb: In the original, the Super Bomb. In the sequel, the M.O.A.P..
- Sound of No Damage: You'll hear a distinct sound when your weapon fails to affect Bloons corresponding to their weakness.
- Spike Balls of Doom: In the sequel, the last upgrades on the dart branch convert all darts to these.
- Super Mode: The Sun God Power-Up in both games.
- Synchronized Swarming: A huge number of the bloons basically join together to form various shapes of animals, plants, phenomena, and such. Examples are birds, dragonflies, sea creatures, an apple tree, thunderclouds, etc...
- Throwing Your Sword Always Works: The katana in the sequel.
- Unintentionally Unwinnable: When first released, it was actually impossible to beat the second game 100%, since 2-5, 3-5 and 4-5 couldn't be beaten with only bomb items due to their low damage against the bosses. This made it impossible to gain the bomb badges for those levels. This was changed in a later update by allowing all bomb items to sometimes shoot Moab Maulers, which deal massive damage to Moab-class bloons.
- Video Game 3D Leap: BSM 2 Mobile has this in presentation form; the 3D graphics are a noticeable upgrade even from BSM 2, yet the gameplay is much the same.
- Video Game Flamethrowers Suck: Elemental Strike and Elemental Arc, the tier 5 and 6 magic attacks of BSM 2. Despite popular appeal, they don't do a good job at popping bloons compared to other attacks in both the online and mobile versions of the game.
- Wake-Up Call Boss: The Calamari Blimp in the sequel. Both the MOAB and the BFB could be easily dispatched by having relatively high firepower. The Calamari Blimp, on the other hand, uses shielded Bloon formations with No-Sell against certain types of attacks, in addition to having an incredible amount of health, thus requiring huge amounts of Research to even stand a chance against it.
- Wave-Motion Gun: The Death Ray Vision upgrade in the original.
- In the sequel, we have Doom Burst Vision and Solid Beam of Doom. Nuff said.
- Wraparound Background: The backgrounds repeat constantly. You'll likely run into the same objects at least ten times in one stage.
- You Will Not Evade Me: The Freeze-Out Power-Up stop all bloons on the screen in the original, allowing you to pop them at leisure.
- Snap Freeze in the sequel is a booster that does this.
- Oh, and don't forget Mass Distraction, an Epic Power in the sequel that does the same thing that Freeze-Out did in the original!
