Enlisted: the complete guide to the WWII shooter where you command a squad

Enlisted looks like another WWII shooter in screenshots and plays like something quite different. The hook is simple and it changes everything: you do not control one soldier, you control a squad.

In this guide:

• How the squad system actually works
• Squad types, and why you shouldn't specialise early
• Which campaign to start with
• Tanks and aircraft in an infantry game
• Is it pay-to-win?
• Weapon handling and historical detail
• Getting started
• Playing the objective, not just the kill count
• Progression: what actually unlocks over time
• Who it's for

You bring a small group of AI soldiers into battle and directly control one of them. The rest follow, take cover and shoot. When the soldier you're controlling dies, you don't go to a respawn screen. You take over the next man in the squad and keep fighting. Only when the whole squad is gone do you swap to another one.

The practical effect is that death feels like attrition rather than interruption. A firefight you'd lose in a normal shooter becomes one you can grind through, three bodies at a time.

A common new-player mistake is loading up on specialist squads before you have a solid infantry core. Keep it boring early; the toys reward you more once you understand the maps.

Battles are grouped into historical campaigns. Moscow, Normandy, Berlin, Tunisia, Stalingrad and others. Populations shift over time, so the honest advice is: pick the front that interests you historically, and if queue times feel long, move to a busier one. You are not wasting progress by trying two.

What sets Enlisted apart from most WWII infantry shooters is that armour and air power share the same match, not a separate mode. A well-timed tank push or strafing run can flip an objective fight that infantry alone was stalemated on. Unlocking and crewing vehicles follows the same squad logic as infantry: you're commanding a crew, not piloting a solo war machine, and losing a crew member mid-engagement matters the same way losing an infantryman does.

Fair question for any free WWII shooter. Paid squads exist and they are convenient, they save grinding, but the free progression works, and skill with an ordinary rifle squad beats a premium squad used badly. Treat purchases as time-savers, not power spikes.

Weapons of the era handle with real period-accurate quirks. Reload speeds, iron sight quality and reliability vary meaningfully between the weapons available to each faction, which rewards learning your squad's specific loadout rather than treating every rifle as interchangeable. Historical accuracy here isn't just flavor text; it changes what tactics actually work with a given squad composition.

Spend your first sessions with a single infantry squad rather than juggling several unlocked types at once. Getting comfortable with the take-over-the-next-soldier rhythm before adding vehicles and specialists to the mix makes the whole system click faster than trying to learn everything simultaneously.

Enlisted's matches are built around capturing and holding points, not around a scoreboard of individual kills, and it shows the moment you play alongside someone who ignores that. A squad wasting its lives fighting for a kill-death ratio in an empty corner of the map is doing less for the team than a squad sitting quietly on a capture point doing nothing dramatic at all. Engineers matter enormously here too. The players and squads building ammo crates and rally points near an active objective usually decide fights that infantry alone would stalemate.

Progression runs on two tracks at once. Your account level, which slowly opens up new squad types and vehicle tiers, and each individual squad's own experience, which improves the soldiers already in it. New players sometimes chase account level aggressively and end up with several half-trained squads instead of one squad that's good. Early on, it's worth resisting the urge to unlock everything at once; a single well-trained infantry squad you actually understand outperforms three mediocre ones you're still learning.

If you'd rather command the vehicles than the men, the same publisher's War Thunder is the other half of this coin.

Enlisted is free, it's specific, and its central idea is its own. Worth an evening to see if the squad loop clicks for you.

Give it more than a single match before deciding. The squad-swap rhythm takes a session or two to feel natural, and most players who bounce off early admit later that the second or third match is where it actually clicked.