Enlisted explained: the squad-based WWII shooter, how it plays and what it costs

By Elizabeth Martin, responsible editor · Published 23 September 2026 · Last reviewed 23 September 2026 · How this article was written

Enlisted is a free-to-play World War II shooter with one structural idea that sets it apart from almost everything else in the genre: you do not control a single soldier, you control a squad. This guide explains that mechanic, what the classes and vehicles do, how progression works after the 2023 restructure, what the game costs in practice, and who is likely to enjoy it. Where a detail changes between updates, we say so rather than state it as settled.

What Enlisted actually is

Enlisted is a squad-based multiplayer tactical first-person shooter set in the Second World War. It is developed by Darkflow Software and published by Gaijin Entertainment, the studio behind War Thunder, and it runs on Gaijin's own Dagor Engine. It is free to play and funded by optional in-game purchases.

The game first appeared as an Xbox Series X|S launch title in November 2020 as a timed console exclusive, reached PlayStation 5 in a closed beta in March 2021, opened to PC players in April 2021 and arrived on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in October 2021. A Steam release followed later, under the name Enlisted: Reinforced in March 2024, which was pulled within a day over launch-day backend problems and relaunched in July 2024 as simply Enlisted, with account linking fixed. We mention the stumble because it is part of the record, not to discourage you: the Steam version has been live since.

If you have played Battlefield, Hell Let Loose or Post Scriptum, Enlisted sits somewhere in between: bigger and more chaotic than a milsim, more deliberate than an arcade shooter, and with a command layer neither of those has.

The squad system: the thing that makes Enlisted different

In a normal shooter you are one soldier. In Enlisted you bring a squad of roughly three to nine soldiers into the match. You directly play one of them. The rest are AI: they follow your position, take cover and open fire on their own, and you can order them to hold a spot or switch your own control to any of them at will.

The consequence is the part people usually miss. When your soldier is killed, you do not go back to a spawn screen — you take over the next soldier in the same squad and carry on, from wherever that soldier happens to be standing. Only when the entire squad has been wiped out do you deploy a different squad from your line-up. A lost gunfight therefore usually costs you one soldier, not your whole deployment.

Two practical effects follow from this. First, your line-up — which squads you bring and how each is equipped — is a real strategic decision made before the match starts. Second, a player with mediocre reflexes but good positioning can contribute a great deal, because a squad placed well keeps producing pressure even when the player-controlled soldier keeps dying.

Soldier classes and what they are for

Soldiers belong to classes, and a squad type can only field certain classes. Documented classes include rifleman, assaulter, engineer, medic, machine gunner, sniper, mortarman, anti-tank, flame trooper, radio operator, paratrooper, guerrilla, saboteur, tanker, fighter pilot, attack pilot, APC driver and motorcycle rider.

Three of these deserve singling out for a new player:

• Engineer. Engineers build. Rally points that let your squad spawn forward, sandbags, ammunition boxes and anti-tank obstacles all come from an engineer. A team without engineers loses ground it has already taken.
• Radio operator. The radio operator is how artillery reaches the battlefield. There is no artillery class that fires guns directly; support fire is called in.
• Anti-tank. Armour is common enough that a squad with no answer to a tank will simply be pushed off an objective.

Tanks, planes and transport

Vehicles are not a separate mode; they are squads you bring into the same match as your infantry. Documented vehicle types include tanks, fighter and bomber aircraft, motorcycles, armoured personnel carriers and armoured trains. A tanker squad, for example, is a crew: you drive or gun while the AI crew handles the rest, and you can swap seats.

Aircraft matter less than you might expect on many maps, because objectives are usually tight urban or trench spaces, but a well-flown attack aircraft against a stalled push can decide a point. Armoured personnel carriers are the quieter pick: an APC parked in cover acts as a forward spawn, which is often worth more than the gun on it.

Nations, fronts and the 2023 restructure

Enlisted originally shipped as a set of separate campaigns — Moscow, Normandy, Tunisia, Berlin and the Far Eastern Front among them — each with its own progression. That is no longer how the game is organised. A large update merged the campaigns into four nations: the USA, Germany, the USSR and Japan. Smaller belligerents such as the United Kingdom, Free France, Australia, New Zealand and China appear inside those four trees rather than as trees of their own.

Progress that a player had made in different campaigns for the same country was combined into a single national progression, the various order currencies were consolidated into one currency called Silver, and matchmaking was changed to weigh the strength of the equipment players bring and to pair historically plausible opponents.

This matters if you are reading older guides: much of the advice written before that update describes a game structure that no longer exists.

Progression, Silver and Gold

Playing battles earns experience and Silver. Experience advances a nation's research tree, which branches rather than running in a single line, and Silver pays for what you unlock. Gold is the premium currency, bought with real money, and is used for cosmetics, premium squads and speeding things up.

One honest caveat: progression speed is the most frequently rebalanced part of this game, and published reviews have criticised it at various points. Any specific number of hours to reach a given unlock would be out of date by the time you read it, so we are not going to give you one.

How a match plays out

The common match shape is an attack-and-defend sequence over a chain of objectives. Attackers spend from a shared pool of reinforcement tickets; defenders win by draining that pool before the last point falls, or by running the clock.

Practical advice that follows from that structure: time spent standing on the objective is worth more than kills, a rally point built behind cover is worth more than a rally point built close, and an engineer squad kept alive is worth more than an aggressive one traded away.

Platforms, cross-play and hardware

Enlisted runs on Windows PC (through Steam or the Gaijin.Net launcher), PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One. Cross-play is supported across those platforms, and one account carries your progress between them.

We are not going to publish PC system requirements here, because the only figures worth trusting are the ones on the current store page, and they have moved more than once. Check the Steam listing for the requirements that apply to the build you are about to install.

What is free and what is paid

The download and the full set of modes are free. Money buys convenience and cosmetics rather than access:

Whether that arrangement counts as fair is a judgement call, and it depends heavily on how much you value your time against your money. What we can say plainly is that no content is locked behind a paywall in the sense of being unreachable by playing.

How Enlisted compares with its neighbours

We are not going to invent scores. What follows is a description of where the games sit relative to one another, which is the part that actually helps you choose.

Who it suits, and who it does not

Published critical reception has been genuinely mixed rather than uniformly positive — reviewers have praised the visuals and level design while criticising matchmaking, animation and the progression system. We report that spread rather than pick the flattering end of it.

Getting started sensibly

1. Pick one nation and stay with it for your first several hours. Progress is per nation now, and spreading it thin is the most common early mistake.
2. Research an engineer squad early. Rally points and cover are the most reliable way for a new player to be useful.
3. Play the objective. Time on the point out-earns kills and out-earns roaming.
4. Do not buy anything in week one. Find out whether the loop suits you before spending. Nothing you can buy is unreachable by playing.
5. Check dates on any guide you read, including this one. Advice written before the campaign merge describes a different game.

Age rating and a note for parents

Enlisted carries a PEGI 16 rating in Europe for strong violence and an ESRB Mature 17+ rating in North America for intense violence, blood and gore. The developer's own terms state that the online service is not provided to users under 16. The game also includes open player-to-player communication, which no rating board can moderate for you.

Sources

• Gaijin Entertainment, official Enlisted site and news section — enlisted.net (nations, research trees, Silver and Gold, matchmaking).
• Gaijin Entertainment, “Welcome to the new Enlisted, Commander!” — enlisted.net/en/about/new/ (the campaign merge into four nations, unified currency).
• Gaijin Entertainment press release on the Steam release — gaijinent.com (Steam availability, cross-play).
• Wikipedia, “Enlisted (video game)” — en.wikipedia.org (developer, publisher, engine, platform release dates, class and vehicle lists, reception).
• Regional store listings (Steam, PlayStation Store, Microsoft Store) and PEGI/ESRB classifications for age rating and system requirements.

Article by Elizabeth Martin, responsible editor, for Business rate s.r.o.. Published 23 September 2026; last reviewed 23 September 2026. Found an error? Write to info@vestronov.online and we will correct it — see our corrections procedure. All diagrams on this page are original SVG artwork produced for this site. Where this article and the game publisher's own current information diverge, the publisher's information prevails.