WWII squad shooter · Explainer

Enlisted explained: squads, classes, fronts and how the free-to-play model really works

Enlisted is a free-to-play Second World War squad shooter in which you do not control one soldier — you control a squad, and the computer runs the rest of it while you fight. That single design choice explains almost everything else about the game: how dying works, why an engineer matters more than a sniper, and why the shop sells whole squads rather than hats.

By Joshua Scott, director of publication · Published 18 September 2026 · Written from publicly available sources, listed at the end of this page. Where anything here differs from information published by Darkflow Software or Gaijin Entertainment, their information prevails.

What Enlisted actually is

Enlisted is a squad-based first-person shooter set in the Second World War. It is developed by Darkflow Software and published by Gaijin Entertainment, and it is free to download and play. Battles are fought on historical fronts — Moscow, Stalingrad, Berlin, Normandy, Tunisia and the Pacific — between four playable nations: the United States, the Soviet Union, Germany and Japan.

It is worth being precise about the genre, because the game is often described loosely. Enlisted is not a modern-warfare shooter and it is not an MMO in the sense of a persistent shared world. It is a session-based multiplayer shooter: you join a match, the match ends, you go back to a menu. What makes it unusual is not the scale of the world but the scale of a single battle, and the way one player's presence on the field is multiplied by the soldiers under their command.

If you have played Battlefield or Call of Duty, the moment-to-moment shooting will feel familiar. What will not feel familiar is that you are responsible for eight other men, that they follow you around, and that when you are shot you wake up as one of them.

The squad: the mechanic everything rests on

In most shooters you are one soldier. In Enlisted you select a squad — typically between three and nine soldiers depending on its type — and you take direct control of one member of it. The rest are run by the game's AI. They follow, they take cover, they shoot, and they can be ordered to hold a position or advance to a marker.

The consequence that matters most is what happens when you are killed. You do not go to a respawn timer. You immediately take over another soldier in the same squad, a few metres away, still in the fight. Only when the whole squad has been wiped out do you return to the deploy screen and pick a different squad from your line-up. A firefight you would have lost in another shooter is often recoverable here, because losing the man you were controlling is a setback rather than an ending.

This is also the answer to a question that is often asked and often answered wrongly: how many people are in a match? Enlisted's standard matches are ten human players per side. The figure of roughly a hundred combatants that the publisher has used in its own marketing counts the AI soldiers as well — twenty squads of several men each. Both numbers are true; they are counting different things. If you see a claim that Enlisted runs 128-player matches, that is a specification from a different game.

Squad members are not interchangeable bodies. Each soldier in a squad is a persistent character you equip, and squads level up and gain slots. That is where the game's progression actually lives — not in a single avatar with a rank, but in a stable of squads you build up over time.

Soldier classes and what each is for

Squads come in types, and the type determines which class of soldier fills it. The roster is large — public reference sources put it at around sixteen distinct classes — and it has grown since launch. Rather than list them all, it is more useful to group them by what they change about a battle.

The engineer is the one most new players underrate

Riflemen and assaulters are what you will spend most of your time shooting with, and they are straightforward: large squads, decent weapons, the backbone of an attack. The class that changes outcomes, though, is the engineer. Engineers build — sandbags, ammunition boxes, anti-tank obstacles and, most importantly, rally points that let your side spawn closer to the objective.

A well-placed rally point behind cover near a contested objective is worth more than a good sniper, because it changes how quickly your entire team can return to the fight. It is also the first thing an experienced opponent will hunt for. If you want to be useful in your first week without being a good shot, build things.

Support that arrives from off the map

Radio operators call in support from outside the battlefield — artillery fire and air support directed at a position you mark. This is a real capability and a genuinely decisive one on a defended objective, but it is a squad class with a cooldown and a line of sight requirement, not a button any soldier can press. Mortarmen do something similar at a smaller scale and from much closer, placing a tube and dropping rounds on a point they cannot see directly.

Armour and aircraft

Tanks and aircraft are not decoration. A tanker squad puts you in an armoured vehicle with a crew; a pilot squad puts you in a fighter or a bomber over the same battlefield the infantry is fighting on. Both are limited per side, and both are vulnerable: anti-tank squads exist specifically to kill armour, and engineers can place obstacles that stop it.

Because this is a WWII setting, the aircraft are period propeller aircraft. There are no helicopters, no drones and no guided munitions — those belong to a different era and a different game.

How closely the weapons and vehicles model their real counterparts is a matter of degree, and it is worth being honest about it. The equipment is drawn from real Second World War hardware and behaves plausibly — different rifles handle differently, armour matters, range matters. It is not a simulator, and marketing language about "authentic ballistics" should be read as a description of intent rather than a technical specification. Play it as a game that takes its period seriously, not as a physics model.

The battle modes

Public reference sources list six modes: Conquest, Invasion, Assault, Destruction, Confrontation, and Armored Train Escort, the last of which is available in custom matches. Most of what you will actually play comes down to three shapes.

• Invasion. One side attacks a sequence of objectives in a fixed order while the other defends. The attackers are working against a clock; the defenders are trading ground for time.
• Assault. A single objective, one side attacking and one defending. Tighter and more concentrated than Invasion.
• Conquest. Several points are live at once and either side can take any of them. This is the mode where squad composition and movement matter most, because you can choose where to apply pressure.

In every one of them, the spawn line follows the objectives. Take a point and your side spawns nearer to the next one; lose it and you are walking. This is why the engineer's rally point, mentioned above, is not a niche gimmick — it is a partial answer to the single biggest cost in the game, which is time spent getting back to where the fighting is.

Fronts, nations and history

Enlisted's battles are grouped by front, and the front determines who fights whom, what terrain you fight on and roughly what equipment is appropriate. The differences are meaningful: Stalingrad and Berlin are close-quarters urban fighting where automatic weapons dominate, Tunisia is open ground where armour and aircraft are far more influential, and the Pacific is short-range jungle and island fighting.

Four nations are playable: the United States, the Soviet Union, Germany and Japan. Other Allied and Axis forces appear inside those armies rather than as separate factions of their own.

One historical note about the game rather than the war: these fronts were originally sold as separate campaigns, each with its own progression track. Levelling up in Normandy did nothing for you in Moscow, and players who spread themselves across campaigns made slow progress everywhere. The developer later reworked this so that progression is shared per nation, with an army that can be sent to any of that nation's fronts. If you read older reviews or guides and they talk about choosing a campaign to commit to, that is why the advice no longer matches what you will see in the menus.

Progression and battle rating

Matchmaking is built on a battle rating. Every weapon and vehicle carries a rating on a scale that runs from early-war equipment at the bottom to late-war equipment at the top, and the rating of the equipment on your active squads determines which bracket of players you are matched against.

The practical consequence catches out a lot of new players. Your bracket is set by your best equipment, not your average. Unlock one powerful late-war tank, leave it in your active line-up, and every other squad you bring — still carrying early-war rifles — goes into matches against opponents equipped throughout for that bracket. If the game has suddenly become much harder for no obvious reason, check what is sitting in your line-up.

The exact edges of the brackets are set by the developer and have been adjusted more than once. Treat the five-point scale as the shape of the system rather than a fixed table.

Free to play — and what money buys

Enlisted is genuinely free. There is no purchase required to download it, no paywall on a front or a nation, and no mode locked behind a payment. Everything described above can be reached by playing.

It is not, however, free of purchases, and it is worth setting out plainly what the shop sells — because this is the part of the game most often described inaccurately in both directions.

The shop sells premium squads, which come with their own soldiers and equipment; premium vehicles; a premium account that increases what you earn per battle; battle passes; and cosmetics. Because paid squads carry equipment you take into battle rather than cosmetics alone, the model is contested. Some reviewers have described the progression and purchase systems as pay-to-win. Others argue that money buys breadth and speed rather than a decisive advantage in a firefight, and that a paid squad still goes into a bracket matched to what it carries.

Both are opinions, held by reasonable people, and this page does not pick one. What we will say without hedging is that a claim of "no microtransactions" or "cosmetics only" would be false. Decide for yourself whether the model bothers you — but decide it knowing what is actually sold.

Who makes it, and what it runs on

Enlisted is built on the Dagor Engine, Gaijin Entertainment's in-house engine — the same engine family behind War Thunder. It is not an Unreal Engine game, and claims that it is are simply wrong. This matters slightly more than trivia, because the engine's handling of large destructible environments and many simultaneous actors is part of why the squad system is possible at all.

On the release history: a PlayStation 5 closed beta ran from March 2021, the PC open beta followed in April 2021, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions arrived in October 2021, and the game returned to Steam in July 2024 after an earlier delisting.

Platforms and getting started

The game is available on Windows PC, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, and Xbox One and Xbox Series X and S. On PC it can be obtained through the publisher's own launcher or through Steam.

We are not going to publish system requirements or an age rating here. Those change between updates and between storefronts, and a number copied from a review is a number that will be wrong within a year. Check the store page for your platform: it is authoritative, it is current, and it takes ten seconds.

Advice for a first week

1. Bring an engineer squad and build. Rally points near the objective are the highest-value thing an inexperienced player can contribute, and they do not require you to win gunfights.
2. Do not hoard your best equipment in the line-up. If you unlock something with a much higher battle rating than the rest of your squads, take it out until the rest catches up, or accept much harder matches.
3. Use the whole squad. Order your soldiers to hold a position while you push from a different angle. Left on follow, they will walk into the same machine gun you did.
4. Learn one front first. Terrain knowledge transfers badly between an urban front and an open desert one. Pick one and get comfortable before you spread out.
5. Expect to die and keep playing. Taking over the next man in the squad is the intended rhythm of the game, not a failure state. Players who treat each death as a reset find the game far more frustrating than it needs to be.

Common questions

Corrections to the earlier version of this page

An earlier version of this article, published before the current editorial process was in place, contained a number of statements about Enlisted that were not correct. We are listing them rather than quietly deleting them, because a reader who acted on the old page deserves to know what changed.

Sources

This page was written from the following publicly available sources, consulted in September 2026. Where they and the developer's own current information disagree, the developer's information prevails.

• Enlisted — official site, enlisted.net: fronts, playable nations, free-to-play model and optional purchases.
• Enlisted (video game) — Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org: developer and publisher, Dagor Engine, platforms, release timeline, class count, mode list, monetisation and critical reception.
• Gaijin Entertainment announcement, gaijinent.com: the Dagor Engine and the figure of around 100 combatants per battle.
• Enlisted news — "About the new progression and matchmaking" and related posts, enlisted.net/en/news: campaign merge, per-nation progression, battle rating brackets and the single silver currency.

Published 18 September 2026 by Joshua Scott. Corrections: info@elorienne.online. See the corrections procedure.