Enlisted Review: The Most Cinematic WWII Shooter You Have to Fight Its Own Systems to Enjoy

Most WWII shooters hand you one rifle and one life. Enlisted hands you a squad. You spawn as a squad leader with six or seven AI soldiers trailing behind you, you fight until you die, and then you don't respawn — you possess the next man in the squad and keep going. When the whole squad is wiped, you pull out a fresh one from your roster. It sounds fiddly on paper. In the middle of a collapsing Stalingrad apartment block, with your machine-gunner laying down fire from a window while you flank with the rest of the squad, it's one of the most quietly brilliant ideas in the genre.

Enlisted has been around since 2021, but the game you'd download today is not the one that launched. The 2025 campaign merge tore up the old structure, and this year's updates have kept refining it. We've put in the hours across every front to tell you where it actually lands in 2026.

The squad system is the whole reason to be here

Nothing on Windows plays quite like this. You're not one soldier — you're a small unit, and you build that unit yourself: riflemen, assaulters, machine-gunners, snipers, engineers who can throw up sandbags and rally points, radio operators who call in artillery, and tankers or pilots who let you swap into an armored vehicle or a plane mid-match. You bring several squads into a battle and cycle between them as they get chewed up.

The result is a scale of chaos that Battlefield keeps promising and rarely delivers. A single objective push can have dozens of AI bodies, real players scattered among them, a tank grinding through a hedgerow and a fighter strafing overhead — all at once, all on maps built from real WWII flashpoints. Normandy, Moscow, Tunisia, the Pacific, Berlin and Stalingrad each have their own texture, and the environmental destruction means the cover you hid behind last round might be rubble this one.

The AI squadmates are the compromise that makes it work. They'll hold a position, follow, and reliably shoot at what's in front of them — but they'll also walk into open doorways, bunch up on a grenade, and occasionally forget you exist. Treat them as disposable firepower rather than a fireteam and the frustration mostly evaporates.

The campaign merge fixed the game's biggest problem

For years Enlisted's fatal flaw was structural. Each front was a separate "campaign" with its own progression and its own player pool, which meant long queues and grinding the same unlocks over and over if you wanted to play more than one theater. The merge collapsed everything into four nations — USA, Germany, USSR and Japan — with a single branching research tree per country and one unified currency, Silver, replacing the old order system.

It's a night-and-day improvement. Matchmaking now assembles historically plausible fights and weighs the strength of the gear on each side, so you're far less likely to bring a bolt-action to an automatic-weapons party. Progression finally feels like it's building toward something coherent instead of fracturing across a dozen dead-end grinds. The follow-up "New Era" update piled on armored transports and a new APC-driver class, and the studio has kept the roadmap busy through 2026. This is the healthiest Enlisted has ever been.

The monetization is where the honesty has to come in

Here's the catch, and it's the same catch that shadows every Gaijin free-to-play game. Enlisted is free, generous with playtime, and perfectly playable without spending — but the store is always leaning on you. The sore spot is premium squads. These aren't cosmetic. A premium squad is an extra squad slot with its own soldiers and often strong, sometimes rare gear, which means a paying player can field more men and more specialist options in a match than a free player can. The community has argued about whether that crosses the line into pay-to-win for years, and the honest answer is: it's not decisive, but it's a real edge, not a skin.

Layered on top is the live-service treadmill. New monthly events introduce mechanics and gear locked behind battle passes, premium purchases, or boxes with unenthusiastic odds, and the fear-of-missing-out is engineered rather than incidental. None of it is predatory in the loot-box-casino sense, and a patient free player can grind their way to a competitive roster. But you will feel the pressure, and the mid-game is where a lot of free players decide the climb isn't worth it.

Who it's actually for

If you want a tight, skill-pure competitive shooter, look elsewhere — the AI squads, the chaos and the vehicle spam mean individual gunfights aren't always decided by the better player. But if you've ever wanted to feel like a small-unit commander in the middle of a real WWII battle, directing a machine-gun nest here and a flanking push there while shells rain down, Enlisted delivers a fantasy nothing else matches. It rewards players who pick one nation, learn its tree, and settle in.

Verdict

Enlisted in 2026 is the best version of itself: the squad system is inspired, the campaign merge fixed the structural rot, and the battles are as cinematic as free-to-play gets on Windows. It's held back, not broken, by a monetization model that keeps a genuine gameplay advantage behind the paywall and never quite stops selling to you. Go in knowing that, pick a front, and it's an easy recommendation to try tonight.

Rating: 7.5 / 10 — A brilliant, one-of-a-kind WWII sandbox with a store that asks a little too much.