Enlisted's best idea is also the reason I keep coming back to it: you don't die when you die. Get dropped as your rifleman and you can flick straight to your machine gunner, your engineer, or whoever else is left in the squad, and keep fighting from wherever they're standing. It's a genuinely clever solve to the thing that makes most WWII shooters feel stop-start, and for the ten minutes at a time it's working, Enlisted is one of the better squad shooters on PC. The problem is everything built around that idea — the bots padding out its lobbies, the grind gating its best toys, the technical rough edges — keeps getting in the way of it.
The squad-swap mechanic actually works
Darkflow Software's core loop is simple: command a small squad of specialists — riflemen, a machine gunner, an engineer, maybe a sniper — and cycle between them as bodies drop. Losing your gunner mid-firefight doesn't mean tabbing out to a spawn screen and waiting; it means you're immediately back in it as someone else, often from the exact position where the fight is happening. That constant availability changes how firefights read. Pushes don't die the moment the point man does, because there's always another rifle in the squad to pick up the momentum. It rewards aggression in a way Hell Let Loose and Post Scriptum, its obvious genre neighbors, don't even attempt, and it's the one thing Enlisted does that I'd genuinely miss if I went back to those games.
The bots undercut the "massive" in massively multiplayer
Here's the catch: a meaningful chunk of the soldiers filling out any given match aren't players. Enlisted leans on AI-controlled squadmates and enemies to pad lobbies, and by most players' informal counts, roughly half the bodies on a team in a typical match are bots rather than humans. That's a defensible design choice for onboarding — new players get eased in against AI before facing veterans — but it stops being a training-wheels feature once you're dozens of hours in and still fighting alongside soldiers who wander into open ground, prone themselves directly on top of you, or freeze up when you need cover fire. Community threads on Steam have complained about this for years, and playing the current build, the complaint still holds: your own squad AI is the least reliable part of your squad. A game built entirely around "always have someone to switch to" loses a lot of its bite when half the people you're switching to can't hold a position.
Premium squads and a grind that nudges you toward the wallet
Enlisted is free-to-play, and it mostly avoids the worst version of that — premium squads cost real money and grant bonus XP and Silver, but they're not stat monsters that outgun anything you can unlock for free. The actual friction is upstream of that: base progression is slow enough that unlocking new weapons, vehicles, and squad slots through play alone takes real patience, and Darkflow runs limited-time events that introduce specific unlocks you can otherwise only chase through premium currency or loot-box-style rolls once the event's gone. None of it is pay-to-win in the direct sense. It's pay-to-not-grind, and pay-to-not-miss-out, which is its own kind of pressure once you've felt how slow the free track actually is.
A shrinking map of campaigns and a solid, occasionally stuttery engine
Enlisted originally sold itself on distinct historical campaigns — Moscow, Stalingrad, Normandy, Berlin, Tunisia, the Pacific, the Bulge — each with its own faction pairing and identity. A late-2023 overhaul consolidated those into four core factions (USSR, USA with the Commonwealth, Germany with Italy, Japan) and turned the old campaigns into a shared map pool instead of separate destinations. It streamlines matchmaking, but it also flattens what used to be Enlisted's clearest hook: the sense of enlisting into a specific, self-contained slice of the war. Under the hood, Gaijin's Dagor engine (the same one running War Thunder) still does a good job of making WWII look and sound the part, with credible weapon feedback and DLSS/FSR support that keeps performance reasonable on modest hardware. Shader compilation stutter after updates and occasional frame drops entering matches or scoping in are the recurring blemishes — not dealbreakers, but frequent enough that you'll notice them across a play session.
Verdict
Enlisted is worth recommending to a specific player: someone who wants the tactical texture of a large-scale WWII shooter but is tired of the dead-air downtime that comes with one life per round, and who's willing to tolerate a slow free-to-play grind and a squad AI that will occasionally embarrass itself. For that player, the squad-swap mechanic alone makes the download worthwhile, and there's real craft in how the shooting and the historical arsenal come together. It's harder to recommend to anyone expecting the immersive, all-human large-scale combat that Hell Let Loose or Squad deliver — the bot presence here is too central and too inconsistent to fake that feeling, and the campaign consolidation has quietly sanded down some of what made Enlisted's setting distinct. A 6.5 reflects a game with a genuinely good idea at its center that hasn't fixed the problems surrounding it for long enough now to call them growing pains.