Game explainer

Enlisted explained: how a squad-based WWII shooter changes the way you play

By Richard Hill, editor and director of publicationPublished 21 September 2026Last reviewed 21 September 202612 min read

Most military shooters give you one soldier. Enlisted gives you a squad, and lets you jump between the soldiers in it as they fall. That single design decision reshapes almost everything else — how you die, how you push an objective, how you spend money. This is a plain description of how the game is built, what it costs, what it needs from your computer, and who it is genuinely not for.

What Enlisted is

Enlisted is a free-to-play, squad-based multiplayer shooter set in the Second World War. It was developed by Darkflow Software and published by Gaijin Entertainment; the Steam store page lists the publisher as Gaijin Network Ltd. It is built on Gaijin’s in-house Dagor Engine, the same technology family the company uses for its other military titles.

The store description the publisher uses is: “An MMO squad based shooter recreates the key battles of the bloodiest war of the 20th century, with hundreds of soldiers, tanks and aircraft taking part in each battle.” That is marketing copy, and we quote it as such — but the shape of it is accurate. Battles are large, they mix infantry with armour and aircraft, and a good deal of what is moving on the map at any moment is computer-controlled rather than another player.

The release history is unusually long, because the game grew in public:

If you have read older coverage that describes Enlisted as a collection of separate campaigns — Moscow, Normandy, Berlin and so on, each with its own progression — that is out of date. A restructuring in December 2023 reorganised the game around four playable nations. Guides written before then describe a game that no longer exists in that form.

The squad: the one mechanic that matters

Here is the thing to understand before anything else. You do not deploy as a soldier. You deploy as a squad. You directly control one soldier in it; the others are handled by the game’s AI and follow the orders you give them. Wikipedia describes squads as holding between three and nine soldiers, with the exact number depending on the squad type.

When the soldier you are controlling is killed, you do not go to a respawn timer. Control passes to another soldier in the same squad, standing wherever that squad happens to be. You keep fighting, from roughly the same position, a second later. Only when every soldier in the squad has been lost do you drop back to the deploy screen — and then you bring on the next squad in your line-up, not the same one again.

Two consequences follow, and they are what make the game feel different from a conventional shooter:

• Dying is cheap, but bleeding a squad is expensive. Trading your life for a kill is often fine. Trading your entire squad for one kill is close to a loss, because you have permanently spent one of the few line-ups you brought to the battle.
• Position matters more than aim. Because you respawn where your squad is, getting your squad to a good place — and keeping it there — is worth more than individual marksmanship. A player with mediocre reflexes and good positioning will outperform the reverse.

Who does what in a squad

Soldiers have classes, and the class determines what weapons and equipment that soldier can carry. The Steam store page describes eighteen soldier classes. Rather than list all of them — the set available to you depends on your nation and on which squads you have unlocked — it is more useful to understand the three jobs they divide into.

The engineer is the class new players undervalue

If you take one practical thing from this page, take this. The engineer builds — rally points, sandbags, weapon emplacements. A rally point built close to a contested objective means your squad and your teammates arrive at the fight instead of walking to it. On a map where the attackers have a long approach, a single well-placed rally point changes the outcome more reliably than any weapon in the game. New players tend to take assaulters, because automatic weapons feel powerful. Experienced players make sure there is an engineer in the line-up.

Anti-tank is not optional

A tank with no opposition will dominate an objective indefinitely. If nobody on your side has brought the means to kill it, you will spend the match losing to one vehicle. Anti-tank capability is not a specialist luxury; it is a thing your line-up must contain.

How a battle actually plays out

Match types vary and the publisher has added and renamed modes over time, so the in-game mode list is the authority. The common shape, though, is a sequence of objectives: one side attacks, the other defends, and the fight moves from one capture point to the next as the attackers succeed. Some modes have both sides contesting the same points instead.

Both sides draw on a pool of reinforcements that runs down as soldiers are lost. This is the number that actually decides a lot of matches. A team that wins every firefight but throws whole squads away doing it can still run out of soldiers before it runs out of objectives.

Practical consequences:

1. Take the point, do not farm the approach. Capture progress wins; kills near the point do not, by themselves.
2. Withdraw a damaged squad. If your squad is down to its last soldier and the position is lost, you are usually better off falling back than feeding the last soldier in.
3. Defend the route, not the room. Standing inside the objective is where defenders die. Covering the approaches to it is where defenders win.

Nations, squads and progression

Four nations are playable: the United States, the Soviet Union, Germany and Japan. Progression runs separately for each of them. Choosing to switch nation part-way through is not a settings change — it is starting again.

What you earn in battle goes into three things: better weapons and equipment, training and perks for individual soldiers, and new squads and vehicles. The important point for a new player is that stronger squads are matched against stronger opposition. Upgrading everything as fast as possible does not make the game easier; it moves you into harder company. If you find yourself being flattened shortly after a big round of upgrades, that is what has happened.

Tanks, planes and why they are squads

The Steam store page advertises more than four hundred vehicles across tanks, aircraft and motorcycles. Mechanically, a vehicle is not a pickup you find on the map. A tank crew or an aircraft crew is a squad, and you bring it on in place of an infantry squad, not in addition to one.

That has a cost you should weigh before you buy a tank you like the look of. A slot spent on armour is a slot not spent on infantry, and objectives are captured by infantry. A tank that dominates open ground is close to useless on a dense city map where it cannot see far enough to shoot anything, and where an enemy with an anti-tank launcher can get within a few metres of it unseen.

Aircraft have a sharper version of the same problem: they are effective against a target that is exposed and stationary, and near-useless against infantry in cover. They also take you out of the ground fight entirely for as long as you are flying.

What it costs

The game is free to download and free to play. It is monetised through optional purchases: squads and packs sold directly, upgrades, cosmetics, a premium currency called gold, and seasonal battle passes. Wikipedia records that the publisher usually runs nine or ten battle passes in a year.

At the time of writing, the Steam store page lists starter packs between US$4.99 and US$34.99. Prices, bundles and regional pricing all change; treat the figure above as an order of magnitude, not a quotation, and check the store before you buy.

Is it pay-to-win?

Reviewers genuinely disagree, and we are not going to pretend otherwise to keep an advertiser happy. XboxEra scored the game 5 out of 10 and criticised the progression as pay-to-win. Penny Arcade, at the other end, called it “an absolute blast” and “the best WWII shooter”. Both reviews are describing the same mechanics; they weigh them differently.

Our reading, stated as opinion rather than fact: paying does not unlock content that is otherwise closed to you, and it does not buy a weapon that cannot be earned. What it buys is time, and sometimes a squad that is convenient rather than strictly better. Whether that crosses your personal line is a judgement only you can make — and because the game is free, you can make it after playing rather than before.

Where you can play it

On PC you have a choice of the publisher’s own launcher or Steam. The Steam listing also declares SteamOS and Linux support. On console the game reached PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series consoles first, and PlayStation 4 and Xbox One later. Steam’s feature list includes cross-platform multiplayer.

What you need to run it

The two numbers worth noting are the 49 GB of storage — which is the same for the minimum and recommended specifications, because the install is the install — and the gap between the minimum and recommended graphics card. A GTX 660 is a card from 2012. It will start the game; it will not give you the large, busy battles the game is built around at a comfortable frame rate. If your hardware is near the minimum, expect to spend time in the graphics settings.

Anti-cheat: what gets installed

The Steam store page discloses that the game uses BattlEye, and that it is kernel-level anti-cheat. This is worth knowing before you install rather than after. Kernel-level anti-cheat software runs with the highest privileges on your machine, and it is loaded whether or not you are playing at that moment, depending on how it is configured.

A great many competitive multiplayer games ship the same kind of protection, and plenty of people install it without a second thought. Others decline to on principle, or because the machine is also used for work. Neither position is unreasonable. We mention it because it is a real condition of playing, and a page that only listed the good parts would be doing you a disservice.

Who it suits, and who it does not

It costs nothing to find out which column you are in, which is the honest argument for trying it rather than reading about it.

Common questions

Is Enlisted really free?

Yes. It is free to download and free to play, with optional in-app purchases. All four nations are available without paying.

Do I control one soldier or several?

One at a time, but you own the whole squad. You directly control a single soldier while the AI handles the rest, and when your soldier is killed you take over another soldier in the same squad.

Can I play it with a friend on a different platform?

The Steam feature list includes cross-platform multiplayer. How that works between specific consoles and PC, and whether it can be turned off, is set by the publisher and by each platform — check the current in-game settings.

Is there a single-player campaign?

It is built as a multiplayer game. Steam lists online PvP and co-op, plus a custom mission and map editor. If you are looking for a story campaign to play offline, this is not that.

How big is the download?

The Steam store page lists 49 GB of available storage for both the minimum and the recommended specification.

Does this page get paid if I click?

Yes, if you click a partner link and then sign up. Aurora Casket Company s.r.o. is paid a commission by the advertiser. It costs you nothing, and you can reach the publisher’s own site directly by searching for it instead. See the editorial policy.

Sources and corrections

This article draws on the following published sources, consulted on 21 September 2026:

• The official Enlisted store page on Steam (app 2051620), for the store description, the four nations, the class and vehicle counts, the anti-cheat disclosure, starter-pack prices, platform and OS support, and the PC system requirements.
• Gaijin Entertainment’s own site and announcements, for the developer, publisher and engine.
• The Wikipedia article “Enlisted (video game)”, for the release timeline, the squad size range, the December 2023 restructuring, the battle-pass cadence, and the cited reviews from XboxEra and Penny Arcade.

All illustrations on this page are original SVG diagrams drawn for this article by the editorial team. They are schematic, not screenshots, and contain no material belonging to the game’s publisher.

Trademark notice. Enlisted is a trademark of its respective owner. Pravitel and Aurora Casket Company s.r.o. are not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Darkflow Software, Gaijin Entertainment, Gaijin Network Ltd or any platform holder. Brand names are used for identification only.