A lot of improvements over the past games, including a bunch of new towers catering to different playstyles (I especially liked the idea of a tower that shoots where your mouse is - giving direct interaction with the player for each round), interesting map types that demand different tactics, making some towers useless on some stages but vital on others. There's also finally a fast forward button.

One thing I'm mixed on is the upgrades. While I do like that each tower now has an extra, super-powerful upgrade, I dislike how they turned 2 upgrade trees into one big one, so you have to buy upgrades you won't necessarily benefit from (like boomerang monkeys being able to pop frozen balloons in stages you have no ice towers). Some of the final upgrades are also so ridiculously priced that there's no way you'd realistically get them by the general completion-criteria point for a stage, only really able to use them in free mode or sandbox mode.

The game is also SWARMING with microtransactions, holy shit. Literally everything in the game has an option to be paid for. More lives? You can buy that. Exclusive tower upgrades? You can buy that. Premium courses? You can buy those. Double money mode? You can buy that. While you never need it for completing the game, the fact it's always there, constantly shoved in your face makes this game feel so damn sleazy.

Still a fun game, but not quite the leap it could have been if many of those ugly freemium choices were either gone, or able to be unlocked in other ways. I mean the game even has a challenge mode (which I assume isn't updating any more). Instead of forcing me to buy the ability to sell my towers for 100% of the price (instead of 80%), or the ability for dart monkeys to throw exploding darts, why not let me earn them instead? Bleh.

As an aside, the quality of this game looked awful when I played it. I doubt it's the games fault since I'm playing this via the Ninja Kiwi Archive on steam, but compared to the previous games it's just to pixelly and low quality.