Enlisted, explained without the sales pitch

What Enlisted actually is

Enlisted is a free-to-play, squad-based 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 in-house Dagor engine.

The premise that separates it from almost everything else in the genre is simple: you do not play a single soldier. You bring a squad. You directly control one of its members at any given moment, and the others follow you as AI, holding the ground you take and filling out the firing line. When the soldier you are controlling is killed, you drop into another body in the same squad and carry on. The squad is only out of the fight when every soldier in it is down.

That one design decision changes the texture of a match. A battle has far more bodies in it than it has human players, so the ground looks and sounds occupied in a way a standard team shooter rarely manages. It also means a mistake rarely ends your round — it costs you a soldier.

Live service games move. Treat the table above as a snapshot taken on 6 October 2026, and check the official site before you act on any of it — where our information and the publisher’s own information differ, the publisher’s own information prevails.

The squad system, which is the whole point

Most shooters give you one body and one life per spawn. Enlisted gives you a unit. You pick a handful of squads before a match — infantry, a machine-gun squad, engineers, a tank crew, an aircraft — and those squads are your reinforcement pool for the round. Within a squad you occupy one soldier and command the rest with a simple order system: follow, hold this position, move to that point.

Those AI soldiers are not decoration. They take cover, they shoot back, they trip ambushes you would have walked into, and they occupy ground once you have taken it. They are also, frankly, not very bright. They will stand in doorways, they will lose track of a target behind a hedge, and they will die in numbers to a competent machine gunner. Treating them as disposable weight of numbers rather than as a fire team is closer to how the game actually behaves.

Who is in the squad

Soldiers belong to classes, and squads are built around them. A rifle squad is mostly riflemen; an assault squad carries submachine guns for indoor work; an engineer squad can put down a forward rally point that lets your side spawn closer to the fighting, plus sandbags, barbed wire and emplaced weapons. Snipers, mortar crews, machine gunners, anti-tank gunners and radio operators each do one job well and are poor at everything else.

The engineer is the role new players underestimate most. A rally point placed sensibly behind cover can decide a sector on its own, because it removes the long walk back from spawn that otherwise bleeds an attack dry.

How a match actually plays

Enlisted is built around objectives, not kill counts. A typical round has one side attacking a sequence of marked points and the other defending them. Taking a point moves the fight forward to the next one; failing to take it, or running the reinforcement pool dry, ends the round. Game modes have been added, renamed and rotated over the years — attack-and-defend variants, a confrontation mode where both sides push, and a mode that strips the squad system back to a single soldier — so the list in any given season is worth checking in the client rather than taking from an article.

What stays constant is the rhythm: a push, a stall, an engineer digging in, a tank arriving to break the deadlock, somebody flanking wide and collapsing it from the side. Rounds run longer than in arcade shooters, and the pace is uneven by design.

Where the fighting happens

The map sets are drawn from several theatres of the war, and the terrain changes how a round plays more than the mode name does. Urban Eastern Front maps are short-sighted, vertical and brutal on anyone who stands still. Western Front hedgerow and village maps reward patience and flanking. Open desert ground makes armour matter in a way it simply does not in a city. Pacific maps bury you in vegetation and reduce most engagements to a few metres.

The structure around those maps has been reorganised more than once. The game originally sorted content into separate campaigns, each with its own progression; a large restructuring update — the one the developers called Enlisted: Reinforced — replaced that with progression organised by army instead, and merged the player pools. If you read an older guide and it does not match what you see in the client, this is usually why.

Tanks and aircraft

Armour and aircraft are squad slots you bring into the match, not rewards for a kill streak. That is an important distinction: a tank is something you have decided to field at the cost of an infantry squad, and it can be lost to a single well-placed anti-tank gunner within thirty seconds of arriving. Aircraft are similarly fragile and similarly decisive, and both are capped so that a match does not turn into a vehicle parade.

The practical effect for infantry players is that you need an answer to armour in your line-up. A squad with no anti-tank capability will eventually meet a tank parked on the objective and have nothing to say to it.

Progression, and why it is slower than you expect

Playing earns experience and in-game currency, and those feed research for the army you played with. Unlocks are squads, soldiers, weapons and vehicles rather than cosmetic tiers. Soldiers themselves can be upgraded and specialised, which means a veteran squad is meaningfully better equipped than a starting one.

The part that catches people out is that progression is tied to the army you chose. Switching to a different side does not carry your unlocks across — you start that side’s tree. Pick a faction you actually want to play before you sink fifty hours into one.

The money: what “free to play” buys and what it does not

Enlisted costs nothing to download and nothing to play. It is also a commercial live-service product, and it is funded the normal way: by selling things. At various points that has included premium squads that come pre-equipped, premium vehicles, a paid progression track, cosmetic items and a paid subscription-style boost to earnings.

Our advice is the same as for any free-to-play title: play it for a week before you spend anything. If the core loop does not hold you for free, no purchase will fix that.

Who it suits, and who it does not

The honest summary is that Enlisted is an interesting game with rough edges rather than a polished one. The squad system is a real idea, well executed often enough to be worth your time. The AI is crude, the balance between a new player’s squad and a veteran’s is wide, and matchmaking can produce lopsided rounds. Because the entry cost is zero, the only thing a trial really costs you is an evening.

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Corrections to this article

This page previously carried a number of claims we could not substantiate. They have been corrected rather than quietly deleted, in line with our corrections procedure.

• Publisher. The page said Enlisted was published by 1C. It is published by Gaijin Entertainment. Corrected 6 October 2026.
• “64-player battles”. This figure appeared five times and does not describe the game. A match commonly fields around ten human players per side, each commanding a squad of AI soldiers, which is why the soldier count is high. Corrected 6 October 2026.
• Game mode names. A mode called “War of the Century” was listed. We could not verify it, and the mode line-up changes between updates, so the page now describes mode types rather than asserting a fixed list. Corrected 6 October 2026.
• “No pay-to-win mechanics”. Removed as unsupportable. See the money. Corrected 6 October 2026.
• AI behaviour. The page claimed AI squadmates call in artillery. Calling in support fire is a player-controlled radio operator function. Corrected 6 October 2026.
• “Thousands of players are making the switch”. Removed; we have no player-migration data and neither did the original copy.
• “Historically accurate maps”. Softened to maps modelled on real locations, which is what can actually be shown.
• Reader-story framing. The page was presented as a reader-submitted story. It was not one. It is now bylined to a named editor, which is what it should always have been.

Sources

This article was written from the game client itself and from the following primary sources. None of these are partner links and we earn nothing from them.

• Enlisted — official site, enlisted.net: game description, platform list, update notes and the current mode and map line-up.
• Gaijin Entertainment — gaijinent.com: publisher identity and company information.
• Darkflow Software: developer identity and credits.
• In-client observation: squad composition, class roles, objective structure and progression behaviour, checked in the live client in October 2026.

Live-service products change without notice. Everything above is accurate to the best of our knowledge on 6 October 2026. Where this article and the publisher’s own information diverge, the publisher’s own information prevails. Spotted something wrong? Tell us at info@celeros.online and we will correct it and date the correction.

Trademark notice. Enlisted is a trademark of its respective owner. celeros.online is independent and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Gaijin Entertainment, Darkflow Software or any other rights holder. Brand names are used for identification only.