Enlisted Review Summary

Accessible & Fair F2P Model: Players appreciate that the game is genuinely free-to-play, offering significant content and enjoyment without requiring purchases. The progression system and grind are described as manageable and not pay-to-win, allowing free players to compete effectively.

Authentic WWII Immersion: The game is highly lauded for its accurate World War II theme, offering realistic weapons, vehicles, uniforms, and historically inspired maps. Players appreciate the deep immersion created by the sound design and chaotic battlefield atmosphere.

Enjoyable & Well-Optimized Gameplay: Players consistently praise the game's core gameplay, describing it as fun, engaging, and smooth. Many highlight its excellent graphics and good optimization, especially for a free-to-play title, noting it runs well even on older PCs.

Fills Unique Niche Among Shooters: Many players see the game as a successful blend of elements from other popular titles like Battlefield, Red Orchestra, and Heroes & Generals, while being more accessible than Hell Let Loose. It offers a unique balance between arcade and realistic combat, appealing to a broad audience.

Rich Content & Customization: The game offers a wide array of weapons, vehicles, soldier classes, and campaigns across different nations, enhancing replayability. Players enjoy the detailed customization options for squads, soldiers, and loadouts, making progression rewarding.

Predatory P2W Monetization: Players report pervasive pay-to-win (P2W) mechanics and costly microtransactions that grant significant advantages, making progression without payment an eternal, unrewarding grind. The game's systems are perceived as deliberately designed to frustrate players into spending money for a competitive edge or faster progress.

Incompetent AI and Squad System: The game's AI, both for allied squad members and enemy bots, is consistently poor. Allied AI is often useless, getting in the way, dying quickly, or failing to react to threats, while enemy AI can seemingly detect players through cover. The squad management system itself is also described as confusing and cumbersome, diminishing the gameplay experience.

Broken Matchmaking and Balance: Players consistently encounter highly imbalanced matches due to a broken Battle Rating (BR) and matchmaking system that fails to account for player skill or equipment tiers. New players frequently face well-equipped veterans, and significant power imbalances exist between factions, weapons, and vehicles. This issue is compounded by a low player count, leading to many bot-filled matches that lack competitiveness.

Unpolished Technical and Core Gameplay: The game is perceived as lacking polish, with outdated graphics, clunky animations, and persistent performance issues like lag and crashes. Core gameplay mechanics, particularly gunplay, are criticized for poor ballistics, inconsistent hit registration, and a general lack of realism, making the overall experience feel unrefined and buggy.

Rampant Cheating Problem: Many players report rampant cheating, with hackers using wallhacks, aimbots, and other exploits. The in-game reporting system and anti-cheat measures are widely considered ineffective, leading to a frustrating and unfair experience where cheaters are not banned and continue to ruin matches.

Dynamic Squad-Based Combat: The game centers around leading an AI-controlled squad of 3-9 soldiers in first-person, allowing players to switch between squad members upon death, effectively providing multiple lives. It features combined arms battles with infantry, tanks, and planes coexisting on large WWII battlefields, offering diverse soldier roles and vehicle types. Squads are highly customizable in terms of soldiers, equipment, and progression.

Objective-Focused Tactical Design: Gameplay revolves around objective-based modes like Conquest, Invasion, and Destruction, demanding strategic teamplay to capture/defend points. Engineers are crucial for building rally points, ammo boxes, and fortifications, which are vital for winning battles and team support. The game encourages tactical approaches like flanking, using cover, and constructing defenses.

Steep Learning Curve & Grind: Players note a significant learning curve, making the game easy to learn but hard to master, requiring patience and skill. The progression system involves extensive research trees for weapons, vehicles, and squad upgrades, often described as grindy, especially for high-tier content. It requires understanding game dynamics and interface over long playtimes.

WWII Tactical FPS Identity: The game is a free-to-play WWII-themed tactical FPS, often compared to Battlefield for its scale and objective-based combat, and War Thunder due to shared developers and similar vehicle mechanics. It aims for a 'lite-mil-sim' feel, offering varied experiences for both casual and hardcore players. While some mechanics are similar to War Thunder, especially vehicles, it is distinct due to infantry focus.

Diverse WWII Factions & Maps: The game features four WWII factions (USSR, Germany, USA, Japan) with historically accurate gear and unique tech trees. While initially structured around distinct historical campaigns, a recent update merged these into national progression trees, allowing players more flexibility across diverse battlefields like Moscow, Normandy, and Stalingrad.

Varied PC Performance: Players report a wide range of performance, from smooth gameplay on low-end systems and Steam Deck to severe FPS drops, lags, and crashes even on high-end hardware. Performance often degrades after graphics updates or on specific maps, and general optimization feedback is mixed, indicating inconsistency in performance across different setups and game versions. PC requirements are perceived as anything from decent to quite demanding.

Unstable Server Connections: A significant portion of feedback highlights persistent network instability, including constant disconnections, lag spikes, and high ping (sometimes reported as 200ms being 'normal' by the game). Players frequently experience issues despite stable internet, and there are specific complaints about the lack of Asian servers and a general call for better server infrastructure investment. This severely impacts the multiplayer experience.

Mixed Graphics Quality: Feedback on graphics is polarized. Some players praise the strong visuals, dynamic lighting, and atmospheric effects, while others encounter issues like graphical artifacts on newer GPUs, short draw distances, and a noticeable performance decrease attributed to recent graphical overhauls. Overall, visuals are generally deemed acceptable but have specific flaws.

Questionable Hit Registration: Players report instances of inexplicable shrapnel kills through walls and concerns about the game's netcode potentially causing shots not to register accurately. These issues point to potential problems with collision detection and the overall hit registration system, affecting fair play.

Varied Game File Size: Player opinions on the game's file size are divided, with some finding it manageable ("workable") and others perceiving it as "big." This suggests that storage requirements could be a point of consideration for some users.

Highly Recommended for WWII Fans: Many players enthusiastically recommend the game, particularly for those who enjoy tactical, immersive WWII shooters. Its free-to-play nature makes it an accessible option for trying out a genre that blends strategic squad play with intense action, often praised over other titles.

Significant Unaddressed Game Issues: A large segment of players strongly advises against the game due to numerous persistent issues, including poor game balance, lack of optimization, and a general unpolished feel. Many express frustration with developers, leading to uninstalls and warnings about wasting time and sanity.

Potential Held Back by Flaws: Players acknowledge the game's considerable potential and unique niche within the WWII shooter genre, but feel it's currently held back by existing flaws and unfulfilled promises. There's a strong desire for new features, such as pure PvE modes, more diverse content, and better overall optimization.

Strong, dedicated player base: Many players have invested hundreds, even thousands, of hours into the game, often since its beta or pre-Steam release, making Steam playtime statistics misleading. This dedicated base highlights the game's addictive qualities and long-term engagement potential across diverse player types.

WWII FPS, Gaijin's footprint: The game is a World War II team-based first-person shooter, developed by Darkflow Software and published by Gaijin Entertainment. It's frequently compared to Gaijin's War Thunder, particularly for its vehicle combat, but with the addition of infantry. Players familiar with titles like Battlefield or War Thunder will find similarities, though some express caution about Gaijin's monetization practices and general reputation.

Extensive content & feature requests: Players have a strong desire for new content, including additional factions (e.g., British, Italian, Chinese), more diverse weapons, new game modes (like a zombie mode or separate plane battles), and expanded historical settings (e.g., Cold War, WWI). There's also a wish for Steam Workshop support and better map rotation options.

Requires capable PC hardware: The game demands a decent PC with good specifications to run smoothly. Players note that the game's large install size also consumes significant disk space, and some hardware/settings tweaking might be necessary for optimal performance.

Localization and server needs: There are specific requests for localized versions of the game, notably in Chinese and Italian. Additionally, players from Asia and Australia are requesting dedicated local servers to improve their gameplay experience.