A review of Enlisted in 2024. In Enlisted, you are not only commanding a single soldier, but an entire squad! This MMO squad based shooter recreates the key battles of the bloodiest war of the 20th century, with hundreds of soldiers, tanks and aircraft taking part in each battle.

Incase you haven’t already heard, Enlisted, Gaijin’s multiplayer world war 2 shooter that puts you in command of your own squad of AI controlled bots, is coming to Steam, complete with all the micro transactions and clunkiness that made it worth avoiding to begin with.

Enlisted has a lot to offer, and being free to play makes it an attractive option for many people out there, but for me it’s a game that’s always fallen a bit short of what I would have wanted it to be. Also despite releasing early in April 2021, the game will be coming onto Steam as an early access title for reasons unknown, and upon launching the game it even tells you that the game’s in a beta state which is honestly kind of weird since the aggressive monetization that lets you buy unique vehicles and weapons using premium currency has been implemented for years and seems to work just fine.

However despite my own personal feelings on the game, I felt like I needed to cover their release onto Steam with a video, because lots of regular viewers of the channel have a big interest in world war 2, plus this release onto Steam could bring a breath of fresh air to the existing community and some additional cash flow for the game itself.

So let’s get down to business – What is Enlisted and what else is being introduced in the update alongside its release on Steam?

Well it’s an online only first person shooter set in the second world war that’s free to download and play, and includes 4 historically accurate factions, each representing a unique theatre of war, covering the United States and Western Europe, the Japanese in the Pacific, the Soviets in Eastern Europe and, of course, sie Germans, each with their own massive tech tree full of tanks, planes and weapons to unlock.

The key selling point of the game and something that sets it apart from other ww2 shooters such as Hell Let Loose and Squad 44, is that you get to control your own squad of AI controlled soldiers, which on the surface sounds really cool, kind of like brothers in arms but in a large, multiplayer battle, however in reality it doesn’t quite live up to expectations.

The biggest problem since day one has been just how clunky and derpy your little AI minions are, and how little control you actually have over them. You basically press X on PC to tell them go stand here and defend an area, and that’s it. Once in position they will stand there perfectly still, occasionally firing at enemies with the accuracy of a storm trooper from Star Wars, getting sniped by enemy players with ease, which means they’re mostly useful as cannon fodder to re-direct enemy fire so that they’re the ones getting shot at instead of you.

Every member of your squad can have their own unique weapons and loadout which is pretty neat, and you can switch between your squad members at will with a tap of the Y key, but truth be told it all just feels like a pretty basic, half baked mechanic that sounds great on paper but in reality just leads to stale and repetitive gameplay where the clunkiness of everyone’s AI is un-missable no matter where you look.

One thing Gaijin’s always done right though is the sheer amount of weapon and vehicle variety they put in their games, I’m looking at YOU, War Thunder, and Enlisted is no exception. All 4 factions have a crazy amount of stuff to unlock, from rackety old bolt action rifles up to late-war, semi-automatic killing machines, heavy tanks and fighter bombers, and it offers far more than pretty much any of its competitors, plus the vehicle handling will feel very familiar if you’ve ever played War Thunder before because it’s essentially the exact same game.

Aesthetically speaking the weapons and tanks and all that stuff look really great, but they’re let down by some really lacklustre sound effects that make almost every weapon sound the same, with sort of a dull, muddy, potato gun sounding effect with each and every shot, which takes a lot of the spectacle out of the otherwise impressive variety on offer.

The weapon handling and gunplay doesn’t fair much better either. Like a realistic shooter, a bolt action rifle can down someone in a single shot, sometimes wounding them and forcing them to heal, and sometimes killing them out right, but I don’t feel like any of the weapons I used have any real feeling or personality to them...

Thanks for watching!