Offering large scale squad based combat in the multiplayer online shooter genre Enlisted is a console and Windows title that pairs infantry, aircraft and vehicles into a single battlefield. With similarities to the likes of the Battlefield franchise players who like to experience largescale realistic World War II combat will find familiar squad mechanics and teamwork within this free to play shooter with MMO progression built on top.
The primary unique premise of Enlisted though is the ability to control a squad of soldiers rather than an individual with AI squad mates fighting against other player squads. Born from a 2016 crowdfunding campaign Enlisted launched its beta access in early 2021 with a progress path to build out additional content to a full release. With players able to control one person in their squad and switch to others as necessary you’ll no longer have to look around for the anti-tank specialist on your team as you’ll be able to bring one along in your own squad.
In offering this experience Enlisted has a focus on realistic gameplay based on the World War II era. This means players can expect realistic locations and weapons while mechanically you’ll find quick time to kills and little forgiveness on the battlefront. These locations are captured in different campaigns with 4 intended in the short term (2 at beta launch) being the Battle for Moscow, Invasion of Normandy, Battle of Tunisia and Battle of Berlin allowing players to command Soviet, British, American and German forces through varied environments. The carefully crafted battlefields are geographically accurate and combine with troop uniforms, landmarks and frontline design to capture historically accurate battlefields.
The heart of your Enlisted experience is your squad though that grows through MMO progression allowing you to increase your squad size, improve abilities and weapons along with various other tweaks. While this MMO progression is there content to date along with the short time to kill means that this progression rarely translates into significant benefit in player vs player fights and rather caters towards your player preferences. However, it is worth highlighting that increased squad size is an upgrade that provides a macro level advantage. Otherwise every single element of Enlisted gains experience separately so focusing on a particular role or weapon is the ideal path of progression.
In total Enlisted offers 12 specialists that ensure you can deal with most situations at hand. These twelve include the trooper, mortarman, sniper, bomber, assaulter, engineer, gunner, radio operator, flame trooper, shotgunner, pilot and tanker. These offer typical archetypes roles of most squad based shooters with players able to mix and match the specialisations as necessary for their intended tactics. Troopers are generally the heart of any squad and then built upon with specialist units to create a force for your strategy. This may include adding in gunners and assaulters to hit an enemy position head on to the strategic use of snipers, bombers and mortarman to support your team. Soldiers also have their own visuals and level up separately to help build your connection towards your battle hardened fighters as they acquire new gear and perks (such as faster movement over obstacles, stance changes or better tank repair).
This squad mechanic when used on maps also makes for an interesting FPS experience with players having to kill all the members of a squad to kill a player completely and also means that the majority of kills you have will be on AI players that are generally easier compared to players. This blend of PvPvE means you’ll generally be able to acquire several kills per squad life and helps build out the player count on maps that help it capture the largescale of World War II battles.
Summary:
- Squad based World War II shooter that lets you build, control and switch between your units as you please.
- Battle it out against other players and their AI squads across realistic battlefields with familiar faction weapons.
- Progress your account, squads, weapons and individual soldiers through your battle tasks.
- Free to play title on Windows, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.
- From Gaijin Entertainment using the Dagor Engine which is also used in War Thunder.
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Review Platform: PC
Totrox
It is hard to distinguish, what is the worst in this game. The game is just a piece of shit.
Just dividing the score for any game into the different parts leave you with Gameplay, Economy, Balance, Community, Support to evaluate. How can I score all that? Zero.
Gameplay: you are playing in the fixed sequence of maps. You are tired with a particular bad map with zero option to win? You have to play it until the server would change it.
When you are first reading the overview, you are told that advanced AI will fulfil the battle with action and realistic behavior. Well, AI in this game is advanced in the way to kill itself. Walking over explosives, ignoring the enemy on knife-distance, running on the machine guns, zero pathfinding – all that you can easily see yourself. The best way to use your AI – is to put them well behind you, so if you are killed – you will resurrect in your squadmate. However, it is not a trivial task, because when your artificial idiot got distracted – he won’t follow your orders and simply die. It is not Artificial Intellect. It is Absolute Idiots.
Economy: two words. It sucks. Price of AAA-game for a half-sized squad with garbage guns? Sure. Regional pricing? Forget it. As the topping – during the beta test you have to pay if you want to early test the third campaign. And when no-one wanted to pay for that shit, devs almost immediately made a giveaway of 1000 slots “to test” – hah, not to test but to work as a meat loafs for those, who paid. They got the SMGs – you got the bolt-action rifle. Go winning, son!
Balance – there is no such thing as balance. As they called it “Asymmetric gearing” resulted in the situation, where Germans (Axis) are clearly boys to humiliate… just as like the USA in Normandy. There is no balance in SMG, in MG, in vehicles.. the list of those issue is endless. The way how devs balance their weapons is clearly illustrated by MG-38/40, which were the top-end guns by the Dec ’20, and became absolute trash in May ’21. As the Russian community grows, the USSR weapons are getting more and more imbalanced. What is the end? Zero human players in the Axis team, and here we go to…
Community. At the one end – all the kind of schoolkids playing is not that bad. The fact that from the 11000 of Xbox player only 48!! reached 20 lvl – is not also that bad. But the problem is, that for 5 of 10 players in the games are bots. You can check it after the match – 5 of 10 players in your team does not exist in the playerbase! They are damn bots. Pretty amusing result for 1 month past OBT, I suppose.
Support: best thing you can achieve on their official forum, right after you’d fill in the ticket for another glitch, bug or network error log – your topic will receive a sign “Similar problem” …. and it will be closed. The game EAC demand pretty much of your PC, won’t work if you don’t have some crucial Windows updates, and if you find that your i9 is using only once core – well, that is not their problem. They are earning money and designing another way to grab your $.
TL;DR. Cheap Battlefield clone, without any logics, tactics, long term goals, any sane progression, any balance – just without anything. Only bots, grind, and greedy devs – that is the Enlisted – the Game ™
Steve
Funny how many reviews are paid for these days. Official review scores of 8-9.5, meanwhile go ANYWHERE with player reviews like metacritic, its currently on 2.9.
“Only bots, grind, and greedy devs – that is the Enlisted – the Game ™”
You forgot glitches not being hotfixed so devs can add more ‘flavour’ content
Deez
In this game it doesnt matter how good you are at FPS games. If you want to play good you will have to pay to unlock SMGs. You can also unlock them but that will take instane amout of time, basically impossible.
Robert DuBois
This game sucks!!! Graphics are low grade and game finding takes forever. You have task to complete every night, but some are impossible to complete. It is also a very toxic environment. players will cuss you out if you don’t play the way they want you to.