Enlisted

Enlisted is a free-to-play World War II tactical shooter developed by Darkflow Software and published by Gaijin Entertainment, running on the same Dagor Engine that powers War Thunder. The PC open beta launched in April 2021, and the game reached Steam in July 2024 under the name Enlisted: Reinforced, where it remains tagged Early Access to this day. What sets it apart from every other combined-arms shooter on the market is squad command: instead of controlling one soldier, a player leads an AI-driven squad and switches between its members mid-fight.

Six historical fronts make up the current roster: the Battle of Moscow, the Normandy landings, Stalingrad, the fall of Berlin, the Tunisian campaign, and the Pacific theater. Each front carries its own uniforms, weapon tiers, and terrain rather than functioning as reskinned deathmatch arenas — the freezing outskirts of Moscow and the bamboo fortifications of the Pacific islands genuinely play differently. Maps are close to fully destructible: a wooden house can be leveled by mortar fire, a fence flattened by a tank, and a foxhole dug on the spot by an engineer with a pickaxe.

The character of each front shows up within the first few minutes of a match. Normandy opens with a beach landing under pillbox fire, then a slow grind through bocage hedgerows dense enough to swallow a tank as effectively as any ambush. Stalingrad turns into street-to-street fighting through factory ruins, where snipers own the open intersections and assault squads chew through basements and blown-out walls instead. The Pacific campaign trades snow for jungle, bamboo bunkers, and boat landings — where tanks bog down in snowdrifts outside Moscow, they bog down in rice paddies here instead.

Darkflow Software had already shipped the battle royale CRSED: F.O.A.D. for the same publisher before Enlisted, and some of that experience with large sessional battles carried straight over into the WWII setting. The first closed test ran in 2020, the official launch arrived in 2021 as a next-gen console exclusive, and for a long stretch the PC version was only distributed through Gaijin's own launcher rather than a major storefront.

Getting Boots on the Ground

A new player picks a country first — the USSR, Germany, the US, Britain, or Japan — and starts with a low-tier infantry squad: bolt-action rifles, no automatic weapons, light tanks with barely any armor, biplanes instead of fighters. The first goal is purely practical: score points by killing enemies and capturing objectives to unlock bigger squads and the next rung of equipment.

Before any of that, a short tutorial and a standalone practice mode cover the basics — moving a squad, switching between soldiers, and taking a tank or plane out on an empty range stocked with every weapon in the game. It's not a substitute for a real match, but it means the first live battle isn't also the first time a new player has fired a gun in this engine.

A major 2023 overhaul rebuilt progression around countries instead of individual campaigns, added a research tree split across infantry, armor, and aviation branches, and merged bronze and silver order tokens into a single currency called silver. That rework means older community guides are only partially reliable — the game a returning player remembers from 2022 is not quite the one running now. Progress feels fast at first: a machine gunner and a light anti-tank gun or medium tank typically unlock within the first few hours, and firefights stop being a pure rifle duel almost immediately.

Past that early curve, progression spreads sideways rather than climbing a single ladder. Instead of maxing out one squad, players build several parallel loadouts — an assault squad with submachine guns for close quarters, a sniper squad for range, an engineer squad for fortification work. A single squad can carry anywhere from three to nine soldiers, and the exact roster depends on which historical division that squad represents — a US 1st Infantry Division squad isn't built the same way as a Soviet Guards rifle division squad.

That's also where the first trap for a new player sits. Progression has been rebuilt hard enough, and often enough, that guides written a couple of years ago are only partly accurate today. What used to be bronze and silver order tokens merged into one silver currency, the old "academy" system for ranking up soldiers is gone, and progress moved from being tied to an individual campaign to being tied to a country as a whole. A first-time player's opening obstacle isn't the game itself — it's figuring out which version of the mechanics is actually live right now.

Combat, Classes, and the Squad-Switch Trick

On paper Enlisted is a first-person shooter. In practice it plays closer to a hybrid of an FPS and a miniature real-time tactics game. The player directly controls one soldier while the rest of the squad follows, holds position on command, and opens fire on spotted targets. Losing the soldier under direct control isn't a trip back to the spawn screen — one button swaps control to the next squad member, and the assault continues from wherever the last one fell.

Classes are locked to specific roles and weapons: riflemen, submachine gunners for room clearing, machine gunners for suppression, snipers, grenadiers and flamethrower troops for bunkers, and engineers with mines and wire cutters. Vehicle crews sit in their own category — a tanker can swap between gunner, driver, and loader seats mid-battle, while a pilot takes a fighter or attack aircraft equipped with bombs and rockets further up the tech tree.

The weapons themselves are period-accurate rather than cosmetic reskins, ranging from Mosin-Nagants and Kar98ks at low tiers to Thompsons, MP-40s, and StG-44 assault rifles closer to the top of the tree. Recoil is heavy, some bolt-action rifles reload one round at a time, and a limb hit doesn't drop a soldier the way a torso hit does — the shooting model leans toward a military sim rather than an arcade shooter.

What softens that harshness is the squad-switch mechanic: dying to a stray sniper round doesn't end the fight, because there are still soldiers left to respawn into, and matches never turn into a long wait for a single life to come back.

Armor and aircraft aren't siloed into separate modes — they share the same map as the infantry fight. A tank can crash through a fence and crush a machine gun nest, a plane can carpet-bomb a column of vehicles, and an infantryman with a panzerfaust can be waiting in a ruined building for exactly that tank a minute later. Infantry, armor, and air support sharing one map without a mode switch is the single biggest reason players stick around, balance rough edges between branches notwithstanding.

Vehicle progression climbs a separate branch from infantry gear entirely. Early tanks are thin-skinned and slow, biplanes carry rifle-caliber machine guns, and neither one changes the shape of a battle much on its own. Mid-tier and late-tier vehicles are a different story — medium tanks with real armor sloping and late-war fighters with cannons instead of machine guns turn a single vehicle into something the enemy team has to actively plan around, not just shrug off.

Is Enlisted Pay-to-Win?

Not in any meaningful sense. Premium squads — pre-leveled soldiers bought for gold, the paid currency — save time but don't hand out weapons or armor that free players can't reach through grinding. Nearly the entire arsenal unlocks for free, just more slowly. It reads more like a line-skip than a purchase of raw power: the same rifle a premium buyer gets today eventually lands in a free player's hands too, once they've logged the hours. A seasonal battle pass adds cosmetics, faster order tokens, and a partial refund in gold for anyone who plays actively enough to finish it.

The game's Steam history undercuts any illusion of a smooth business model, though. Gaijin pulled Enlisted: Reinforced from Steam Early Access one day after its March 2024 launch — players objected to a paid starter pack bundled around an otherwise free game, and account linking between Steam and the main Gaijin.Net account was breaking for a chunk of buyers. The re-release landed that July, but the Early Access label has stayed put ever since.

Modes and What's Missing

The core loop is a country-versus-country PvP battle on a large map with a chain of capture points: the attacking side pushes from a beachhead or city outskirts toward the center, the defenders hold and counterattack. A separate matchmaking mode called Lone Fighters strips away the full-squad respawn and forces players to pick individual soldiers one at a time, which raises the cost of every death and slows the whole match's pace.

There's no standalone PvE content here — bots fill empty slots when a lobby is short on live players, but that's a stopgap for matchmaking, not a co-op mode with its own progression. What the game does have, unusually for a session-based shooter, is a built-in mission editor added with the Burning Sky update, letting players build their own multiplayer maps and scenarios from existing assets. Matchmaking sorts battles by squad gear rating rather than an abstract player level, which keeps low-tier loadouts from running into maxed-out opponents too often, and each front unfolds in stages — losing one capture point shifts the whole battle line toward the next rather than opening the entire map at once.

Beyond the standard front-by-front battles, Darkflow runs recurring themed events — holiday modes with unusual rules and, periodically, a Modern Conflict crossover that swaps 1940s gear for present-day rifles and vehicles for a limited window. None of that touches the core structure, but it does refresh the map rotation for anyone who's logged hundreds of hours in the classic campaigns and started feeling the repetition.

Concurrent Steam numbers over the past year have sat somewhere between roughly two thousand and five thousand at peak hours, depending on which tracker is checked, against a historical high several times that. Those aren't huge figures, but they're workable for a niche tactical shooter — and a meaningful slice of the playerbase sits outside Steam entirely, on the native Gaijin.Net launcher and consoles, where this kind of tracking doesn't reach.

Sound and visuals lean into the same commitment to authenticity as the rest of the game. Different weapons are genuinely distinguishable by ear, explosions carry real weight through the mix, and vehicle engines growl differently depending on the type. Visually, Enlisted goes for the muted look of wartime footage rather than bright stylization — dulled uniform colors, smoke-choked streets, fog rolling off the river on dawn maps — all of it working toward a sense of presence rather than spectacle for its own sake.

Platoons, Not Guilds

The social layer here is thinner than what a classic online game offers. There's no persistent guild system with ranks or a shared bank — instead, players form platoons, temporary groups that queue into one match together and coordinate over voice or text in the lobby. Squad management is a personal matter: up to six loadout presets per country without a subscription, ten with an active premium account.

A chunk of the community organizes into informal clans through third-party Discord servers, coordinating joint sessions and swapping notes on vehicle placement. None of that replaces an in-game clan structure with its own board or storage — it all runs on outside tools and the initiative of community organizers rather than anything the game itself provides.

Solo play holds up better here than in most team shooters, though. Since every player already commands several AI soldiers, showing up without a coordinated group doesn't leave anyone helplessly exposed — the squad covers its own back, even if not quite as well as a real human teammate would.

Strengths and Weaknesses

Strengths

• AI squad command gives a first-person shooter a layer of tactical depth most direct competitors don't have
• Infantry, armor, and aircraft share the same map without splitting into separate modes
• Six distinct historical fronts with their own gear, terrain, and side balance
• Destructible maps that genuinely change the tactical picture mid-battle rather than serving as set dressing
• Premium content saves time without gating weapons behind a paywall
• A built-in mission editor — a rarity for a session-based PvP shooter

Weaknesses

• Still tagged Early Access on Steam years after the game first launched
• No standalone PvE mode — bots are just a matchmaking fallback
• Progression and economy have been rewritten multiple times, which makes older guides unreliable
• Social tools are limited to platoons, with no persistent clan structure
• Balance between infantry, armor, and air support shifts noticeably from patch to patch

Should You Enlist

Enlisted occupies a niche with almost no direct competition: approachable enough to pick up in an evening, but not so simplified that it collapses into tactic-free deathmatch. The AI squad idea solves an old problem with team shooters — dependence on strangers who may or may not cooperate — and turns even a solo session into a coherent tactical episode. Anyone who values historical grounding and combined-arms fights over pure twitch aiming will find plenty here to chew on for dozens of hours.

It's also a project that's honest about being unfinished. Progression hasn't fully settled, there's no PvE track to speak of, and guild-level social structure simply doesn't exist in the way most online shooters and MMOs offer it. Enlisted is worth trying for the squad-command mechanic and the scale of its battles, not for social depth or roleplay — that's a different game's job, and this one never pretends otherwise.

Comparing Enlisted directly to big-budget WWII shooters from major studios isn't entirely fair — there's no Hollywood-grade cinematic campaign and no voiced-over story missions here. What it does have is something those competitors often skip: a genuine interest in the war itself, expressed through map design and equipment rather than a narrator's voiceover. For anyone willing to forgive a game that's been Early Access for years running, this is a rare case of a free shooter offering more tactical freedom than several paid alternatives.

Enlisted FAQ

Is Enlisted free to play? Yes. The entire arsenal and every squad are earnable without spending money; gold coins mainly buy time savings and cosmetics rather than exclusive gear.

Does Enlisted have PvP? Yes, and PvP is effectively the whole game — country-versus-country battles with capture points are the only real content on offer, since there's no separate PvE mode.

Is Enlisted still in Early Access? On Steam, yes — the Steam listing has carried the Early Access tag since the July 2024 relaunch, even though the game itself has been publicly playable since 2021.

Is Enlisted worth playing in 2026? For anyone drawn to combined-arms WWII combat and the AI squad-command hook, yes; players looking for guild-based social systems or a PvE track should look elsewhere.