Bloons TD 6

The first thing worth knowing about the people who dislike Bloons TD 6 is how long they played it before saying so.

The median playtime across its hundred most-helpful negative reviews is 254 hours. The mean is

487. Among the 2025 and 2026 critics there are accounts at 849, 1,022, 1,066, 1,229 and 4,800 hours.

For comparison, the median across its hundred most recent reviews — overwhelmingly positive ones — is 80 hours.

That inverts the usual shape. In most games the critics are the people who bounced in the first afternoon. Here they are the most invested players on the platform, and what they are angry about is not the game.

The game

Twenty-five monkey towers, each with three upgrade paths you can only partly commit to, seventeen heroes who level through a match, and a bloon economy where every popped layer spawns the layers beneath it. It is a genuinely deep strategy game wearing a cartoon, and the depth is why an eight- year-old title still draws 392,194 reviews at 97.2% positive.

Ninja Kiwi has also kept the promise most live-service games break. Update 55.0 arrived on 3 June 2026 with a new hero; there have been fifty-five of these, and the towers, maps, heroes and modes they added were free. Seven and a half years of that is not a small thing, and it's most of why value scores a 9.

Achievements confirm the depth is real rather than padded: 156 of them, the most common held by 87.9% of players, the median by 10.6%, the rarest by 0.2%.

What its critics are actually saying

58 of the 100 most-helpful negatives raise money, with "microtransactions" appearing in 23 of them by itself. It is not a fringe complaint and never has been.

The most-upvoted negative in the game's history, at 1,077 votes, opens: "So Bloons is a freaking incredible game." The second, at 497: "I like this game, I really do. As far as gameplay is concerned, the game is awesome. I can not, however, recommend purchasing this game as it is riddled with microtransactions." A third, at 144 votes: "I am all for cosmetic microtransactions in a paid game but it's beyond a joke when I pay for a game only to have features etc locked away behind a paywall."

Normally I'd date those and set them aside — they're from 2019 and 2020, and the per-year vote medians say the old cluster is much the heavier one (59 and 60 votes in 2018 and 2019, against 9 in 2026). Six-year-old complaints about a live game are usually obsolete.

They aren't here. The 2025 and 2026 negatives make the same argument about newer things, and there are 34 of them in the hundred. A 849-hour player in February 2025: "First, there was the double cash boost DLC, then a DLC that outright lets you skip part of the game, and now a rushed rogue-like DLC that mostly recycles assets from the base game." A 592-hour player in October: "it is clear that this is a mobile game in a steam game's clothing." A 92-hour player in June 2026 objects to a hero sold for what they say is sixteen dollars, "when they've all been free for the game's entire lifespan."

The number that settles it

I don't have to take their word for it, because Steam scores DLC separately.

The same audience that made the base game one of the highest-rated on the platform has rated both paid expansions Mixed, at prices close to the whole game's. That is about as clean a verdict as a review corpus ever produces, and it's why monetisation scores a 4.5 while everything else scores high.

Two things that aren't about money

Co-op is unreliable. Twelve negatives discuss it and eleven mention disconnects, connections or servers, and these are not new accounts. A 1,022-hour player in July 2025: "co-op has been broken for at least 6 years now. My main reason for playing this game is to play with my son and much of the time we can't finish a single map due to disconnects." Another at 1,229 hours says the same thing. Multiplayer scores a 5.5 for it.

The interface is a mobile port's. That complaint dates to launch week in 2018 and hasn't gone away; the single negative in the hundred most recent reviews is simply "The UI was designed by the monkeys."

The case for the defence

It deserves stating, because a 108-vote reviewer makes it well: the store sells convenience, not victory, and "the hardest game-mode in the game restricts anything that can be bought with micro-transactions." That's CHIMPS, and it's true — the game's own peak content is walled off from the wallet, which is more than most live-service games can claim.

And last week a 360-hour player described it as "easy to access the whole game without spending any irl money on anything (besides the initial purchase)." Ninety-nine of the hundred most recent English reviews are positive. Whatever the store is doing, it is not ruining the experience for the people currently playing.

The verdict

Bloons TD 6 earns an 8.5.

The tower defense here is close to the best there is, the free-update record is genuinely admirable, and NZ$17.59 buys more game than almost anything at that price. If you play solo and ignore the shop, this is an easy recommendation and you will get hundreds of hours out of it.

It isn't a 9 because a paid game with a growing in-game store is a compromise, because the two paid expansions were rejected by the game's own audience, and because co-op has been dropping players for six years while new monetised content ships on schedule. Melvor Idle scores the same 8.5 on a fraction of the production budget partly by not doing any of that; Idle Champions sits at 6.5 for doing much more of it.

The 254-hour critics aren't asking Ninja Kiwi to stop making the game. They're asking it to stop selling them things inside a game they already bought.