Enlisted review: the WWII shooter where dying barely slows you down

Enlisted is the WWII shooter I keep reinstalling and never quite know how to recommend without a footnote attached. On a good night it does something no other free infantry FPS manages. On a bad one it reminds you exactly who publishes it. Coming back through the Reinforced relaunch, I am more sure than ever that the good outweighs the annoying, but only just, and only if you walk in knowing the deal.

The pitch is simple and kind of brilliant. You do not play one soldier. You play a squad of up to nine, steering one directly while the rest follow orders, and you can jump into any of them the second your current body hits the dirt. Get killed and there is no respawn screen, no loading loop. You snap into the next guy and keep fighting. It changes the whole texture of a WWII shooter, and it is why Enlisted deserves your time.

Gameplay: dying is just a squad swap

That squad mechanic is the entire game, and it rips. Getting mowed down by a machine gunner used to mean a trip back to the menu. Here it means popping into your rifleman two meters behind you and immediately going after the position that just wrecked you. Battles stay dense and relentless because the map never suddenly empties out of you. It rewards pushing forward, thinking about which soldier you leave where, and a kind of squad chess most shooters never even attempt.

Pair that with genuinely huge battles across Normandy, Berlin, Stalingrad, Tunisia and the Pacific, and you get atmosphere that far pricier shooters keep failing to bottle. Bolt action rifles crack, tanks grind over rubble, planes strafe the treeline, and the AI squadmates pad out the chaos so a match feels crowded even when the human count is modest. The gunplay has real weight to it and clearly prefers deliberate fights over twitch reflexes.

It is not flawless. Your AI teammates are useful but dim, and yes, one of them will absolutely walk face first into a wall while you are trying to hold a point. Vehicle balance can swing a match, and one good pilot or a heavy tank in the wrong lobby feels oppressive. But that core loop, push, die, drop into your own squad, push again, is one of the quietly smartest ideas in the free shooter space.

Content and progression: here comes the grind

Enlisted is not stingy with content. Multiple fronts, a steady drip of squads, weapons and vehicles to unlock, and enough historical range that you can pick a campaign and specialize in it. The research and upgrade ladder is long, and for the first stretch climbing it feels good.

Then the grind takes its mask off. Progression is heavily gated, and without a premium account or some targeted buying, unlocking the squads and gear you actually want costs you a serious pile of hours. Research tokens and daily rewards keep you logging in, and honestly that is a more upfront structure than a hard paywall. But there is no talking around it: the pacing is tuned to make premium look appealing, and the higher you climb, the slower the free lane crawls.

Credit where credit is due, this is not egregiously pay to win the way some free shooters are. Premium squads and vehicles hit hard, and running into them in matchmaking can feel unfair, but skill and smart squad play still decide most fights. You are buying time and convenience, not wins. Measured against some of its stablemates the economy here is fair, which is a low bar that Enlisted clears comfortably.

Tech, and that rough Reinforced relaunch

The move to Steam as Enlisted: Reinforced was supposed to be the big consolidation moment, and it was memorably a mess instead. The early access launch drew immediate pushback over technical problems and player unhappiness, and sales were paused the same day. Worth naming, because it captures the tension sitting at the center of this game: a great shooter that keeps tripping over the business decisions bolted to it.

It has settled down since. The client runs well, looks sharp for a free title, and scales across a wide spread of hardware. It sits at a "Mostly Positive" reputation on Steam across tens of thousands of reviews, which feels exactly right for a game people genuinely enjoy while grumbling about the monetization. The community shows up, matches fill, and the engine handles the scale of these battles without flinching.

So who is this for?

Enlisted is for the WWII fan who wants something structurally different from the Battlefield and Call of Duty template, and who is fine treating progression as a hobby rather than a weekend project. If the squad mechanic clicks with you, and it clicked hard with me, there is nothing else like it out there, and trying it costs you nothing.

If grind makes you bounce, or you want a level playing field the minute you install, adjust your expectations now. The road to a competitive loadout is long, and premium squads will ruin the occasional match for you.

The verdict

Enlisted is the most inventive free WWII shooter on the market, carried by a squad system that rewrites what death and respawning even mean in an FPS. The scale, the atmosphere and the genuinely fair economy make it easy to love. The grind and that fumbled Reinforced relaunch make it hard to love without conditions. I keep coming back anyway, which tells you most of what you need to know.

Score: 7.6 / 10. A standout idea and a great shooter, wrapped in a grind you have to make peace with.