Enlisted is a free-to-play World War II shooter from Darkflow Software, published by Gaijin, the War Thunder company. You play a squad leader who carries 4 to 9 AI soldiers with you, and when you die you jump into the next one instead of waiting on a respawn timer. Tank squads and aircraft squads work the same way, with a crew you switch between.
The Steam listing describes battles with “hundreds of soldiers, tanks and aircraft” and lists four nations: USA, USSR, Germany and Japan. The official site claims more than 250 weapons and more than 150 tanks. Storage is 49 GB on PC, and the minimum spec is an Intel Core i3, 8 GB of RAM and a GeForce GTX 660, which is a 2012 graphics card.
It launched on Xbox Series X|S in November 2020, went into PC open beta on 8 April 2021, reached PS4 and Xbox One on 4 October 2021, and arrived on Steam in full on 16 July 2024 after a March 2024 Early Access spell. That Steam date matters for the numbers later in this Enlisted review, because Steam is the only storefront that publishes concurrency.
On 7 September 2026 the Steam page showed 78% positive across 20,151 all-time reviews and 79% positive across the last 1,245. That is a Mostly Positive badge in Steam’s language, 5 points under Hell Let Loose’s 83% and a long way from a controversy.
Who it is for
The reader this Enlisted review is written for has played Battlefield V or Call of Duty: WWII, has heard Hell Let Loose is slow, and wants to know if the free option is a trap. The short answer is that it is a fair trade with a clearly marked price on the way out.
Enlisted suits three kinds of player. The solo player who wants a full-scale battle without a Discord server. The War Thunder player who already trusts Gaijin’s tree-and-tier progression. The parent with 20 minutes, because a match runs 10 to 20 minutes, not 90.
It does not suit players who see AI squadmates as clutter, players who want every enemy to be a human, or anyone who resents a store tab inside a game. The store tab is large, and the next four sections put a dollar figure on everything in it.
How this Enlisted review was built
- No premium squad purchased, no benchmark run, no match times logged. This is a research-based review, not a hands-on test
- Every figure is from the Gaijin store, the Steam and PlayStation store pages, Enlisted’s own news posts and the public Steam Charts feed, each checked on 7 September 2026
- Where the developer states a number, it is written as the developer’s statement; where a number is not public, the review says so rather than guessing
- We may earn a commission when you buy through our links. Commissions never touch scores or rank order
Scores are Shoptera’s judgement of the published evidence. They will move when prices or the progression rules move, and the changelog at the foot of the page records each move with a date.
$0 buys the whole game, at half speed
The base game costs nothing on every platform, with no paid campaign and no locked nation. Every weapon and vehicle in the four research trees can be researched with experience earned in battle and bought with Silver, the single free currency that replaced Bronze and Silver Orders in the December 2023 merge. On 27 October 2023 Darkflow cut perk resets from 400 Silver to 90 and raised a soldier’s resale value to about 95% of purchase price, so mistakes in a free lineup are cheap to undo.
Speed is where the free player pays. A Premium account doubles research, squad and soldier experience, so a free player researches the same tree at half the rate of a paying one, and the Steam page’s 400-plus vehicles mean that tree is deep.
There is a second, subtler limit. Since October 2023 a lineup can hold at most two squads of one specialisation, two Assaulter squads for example, and premium squads are exempt from that cap. A free player who wants a third assault squad in battle cannot have one; a paying player can.
Weigh that against what free gets you. Every map, every mode, every nation, every battle rating bracket and the basic track of every battle pass. The trade is time for money, and the exchange rate is set out below.
Cost 02 · Premium account$5.99 to $23.99 for a Premium account
The Gaijin store sells Premium in three lengths: 20 days for $5.99, 60 days for $12.99 and 180 days for $23.99, all checked on 7 September 2026. The 180-day pass works out at 13 cents a day, against 30 cents a day for the 20-day pass, so the long pass is the only one that makes arithmetic sense for a regular player. The PlayStation Store lists the same 180-day pass at the same $23.99.
The listing spells out what it does. Plus 100% research experience, plus 100% squad experience, plus 100% soldier experience, one extra infantry squad slot in battle, one extra vehicle squad slot in battle, and a larger soldier reserve. In plain terms you level twice as fast and bring two more squads to every match.
Set against the category, $23.99 for six months is $26.00 less than one copy of Hell Let Loose at $49.99 and buys you the whole progression system running at the intended speed. The weakness is that it expires. Six months later you are back to 1x, and the store knows it.
$19.99 to $39.99 for a premium squad
A premium squad is a fully equipped, pre-levelled squad that skips the research tree and, in the developer’s words, “earns +100% more experience in combat”. Prices on 7 September 2026 ran from $19.99 for the PPS-43 Squad at Tier II to $39.99 for the Tier V Krieghoff FG, M1928A1 Thompson, MG 42 Early and F-80A-5 squads. Tier III armoured squads such as the Kugelblitz and Skink sit at $29.99, and Tier IV heavy armour such as the Tiger West at $34.99.
Every squad listing bundles 200 to 400 Gold, worth $2 to $4 at the 1,000-Gold pack rate, so the effective squad price is about $2 to $4 lower than the sticker. The “Thunder in the Sky” bundle pairs the two SPAAG squads for $50.38 against $59.98 separately.
What a premium squad buys
The exemption from the two-squad cap, a squad that is already at level 4 with its gear attached, and the experience bonus that feeds the rest of your nation’s tree. For a player who has settled on a nation and a battle rating, one $24.99 to $34.99 squad is a permanent upgrade, not a subscription.
What it does not buy
A stronger gun than the free tree offers at the same battle rating, because battle rating is the matchmaker’s yardstick and a Tier II premium squad still fights at BR II. It also does not buy skill, which is the most common complaint in the Steam reviews and the least fair one.
900 Gold for the Elite battle pass, eight seasons a year
Since the 25 November 2024 format change, each battle pass season is shorter, with 30 non-repeating levels instead of 75. The Elite track costs 900 Gold, and Darkflow states it is fully recoverable in Gold over the season plus 100 Gold on top at completion, so a player who finishes it funds the next one from inside the game. Eight seasons had started in 2026 by 26 August, which is a new season roughly every five weeks.
Nine hundred Gold costs $8.99 in real money at the 1,000-Gold pack rate, or two 500-Gold packs at $4.99 each. The full Gold ladder on the Gaijin store runs 500 for $4.99, 1,000 for $9.99, 2,800 for $24.91, 6,250 for $49.99 and 13,500 for $99.89, with a custom amount from $1.
The Elite track’s payout in the eighth season of 2026 was four unique weapons, two unique soldiers, one tank camouflage and one aircraft; the free track gave one weapon and one unique soldier. Darkflow’s own estimate is that all main rewards fall in about 10 days of active play with the Elite pass.
Four nations, five battle ratings, one tree per nation
Before 4 December 2023 Enlisted sold progression by campaign: Moscow, Normandy, Berlin, Tunisia and the rest, each with its own tree. The merge folded all of that into one research tree per nation, so your Normandy and Pacific progress for the USA became one American tree. Progress from any theatre now feeds the same pool.
Battle ratings and the matchmaker
Every weapon and vehicle carries a battle rating from I to V. Your lineup’s rating decides who you fight, and on 20 June 2024 Darkflow narrowed the brackets to BR 1 to 2, 2 to 3, 3 to 4 and 4 to 5 when the queue has enough players, falling back to the older 1 to 3 and 3 to 5 spread when a nation or rating is short. Battle rating does not always track tree position; the developer’s own example is a Tier 4 weapon carrying a BR of III.
Where the map comes from
The matchmaker picks a mission to suit the era of your gear, so a BR I lineup lands in early-war maps and a BR V lineup in 1945. The USSR fights only Germany on Soviet-relevant fronts, and the Far Eastern Front for the Soviet invasion of Manchuria arrived in December 2024.
For the free player that structure is the most important change of the last three years. One tree per nation means one grind, not five.
2,983 average Steam players in August 2026
Steam Charts logged an average of 2,983 concurrent players on Steam in August 2026 with a monthly peak of 5,361, against 3,101 in February, 2,938 in March and 2,795 in July. The all-time Steam peak stands at 7,492. Read across seven months, the Steam population has held between 2,795 and 3,101 with no trend either way, which for a 2021 free-to-play game is stability rather than decline.
That figure understates the game, and the article has to say by how much it cannot say. Steam is one of four storefronts; players on the Gaijin launcher, PlayStation and Xbox are not counted, and Gaijin does not publish a total. Console and launcher players share the same matchmaking pool, so a Steam count of 3,000 is a floor, not the population.
Hell Let Loose, for comparison, averaged 3,388 on Steam in the same month with a peak of 7,917, and it costs $49.99. The two games sit within 14% of each other on the one metric that is public.
What the number means at your desk
Three thousand concurrent Steam players plus an unknown console and launcher population, split across four nations and up to four battle rating brackets, sounds thin. In practice Enlisted fills the gaps with AI squads, so a lobby with 20 humans looks and sounds like a lobby with 200 soldiers. The matchmaker’s fallback rule exists for the same reason: when a bracket is empty, it widens the spread rather than making you wait.
The cost of that design is that some of the enemies shooting at you are bots, and the bots are not subtle. Public review data is split on whether that is a feature. Metacritic carries no critic score for Enlisted, and its PC user score was 5.9 from 93 ratings on 7 September 2026, with 38% positive, 34% mixed and 28% negative.
Steam’s 78% from 20,151 reviews is the larger and more useful sample. The recent 30-day figure of 79% from 1,245 reviews says the September 2026 build is landing about where the game always has.
What the competition does better
Hell Let Loose does human scale better. Its matches are 50 against 50 with no bots, its 14 roles and commander layer force teamwork, and its all-time Steam peak of 21,086 is nearly three times Enlisted’s 7,492. It costs $49.99, or $59.99 for the Deluxe and $69.99 for the Ultimate edition, and needs 12 GB of RAM against Enlisted’s 8.
Battlefield V does polish and destruction better, with a 64-player cap and a list price of $49.99 that drops to $2.49 in sales. It has had no content update since 2020, so it is a finished product where Enlisted shipped an update on 5 August 2026 and a battle pass on 26 August.
Squad 44 does milsim better, with a 100 GB install, 150-plus weapons and $19.99 on the sticker, at the price of a Mostly Positive 79% from 11,775 reviews and a 100-player lobby that empties outside peak hours.
Enlisted’s answer to each is the same. It is free, it is updated, and it puts tanks, aircraft and infantry in one match on a 2012 graphics card.
PC and console: where to download it
On PC the choices are Steam and the Gaijin launcher, and both use the same account, so a Steam player and a launcher player are in the same queue. Linux is supported on Steam. Storage is 49 GB on both routes.
On console the game is free on the PlayStation Store for PS4 and PS5 and on the Microsoft Store for Xbox One and Series X|S, with the same in-game store. The PlayStation Store’s USA Starter Bundle at $4.99 holds 300 Gold, three days of Premium, a four-star US medic and a three-star M50 Reising, which is the cheapest paid on-ramp on any platform.
The weakness on console is the one Enlisted has had since 2021: input and progression were built PC-first, and an XboxEra review of the console build scored it 5 out of 10 on controls and performance. The March 2024 update added a high performance graphics mode for PS4, PS4 Pro and Xbox One, which is the developer’s answer.
The Enlisted brand page collects every Shoptera article on the game.