Enlisted – Preview

Gaijin Entertainment is no stranger to our site, as we have covered many of their games, ranging from vehicular combat game Crossout, realistic War Thunder, wacky shooter CRSD and many more. This time, however, we take a look at Enlisted, a shooter that drops you in an array of massive World War II battlefields. Play as Axis or Allies and try to deplete the enemy’s troops in this brand new shooter, which is still in development. We were lucky enough to try out the Armed to the Teeth Founder’s Bundle to see how well we’d manage when fighting hordes of soldiers clinging to dear life.

Enlisted is a mass multiplayer online shooter, in which you either pick the side of the Axis or Allies in World War II scenarios. This often consists of leading small squads on the battlefield, while trying to deplete the enemies’ reinforcements. As you play more and more, you’ll unlock more squads to command, ranging from standard infantry troops to those who can actually commandeer a tank. This creates some diversity on the battlefield and makes for a very hectic but endearing experience.

The game is quite straightforward, as you either have to repel enemy troops or take over certain points of the map. Everything is marked properly, but sometimes in such a hectic battlefield situation, it’s hard to distinguish friends from foes. We actually believe this is quite realistic, as we can imagine actual soldiers being dazed and confused with such large numbers of friends and enemies spread all over the place during a massive attack. The controls work as they should, but the tank controls feel a bit clumsy and wonky. You sometimes do get stuck when trying to climb small obstacles, or clip through trees making it hard to move, etc. It’s clear that certain elements are still in their beta phase.

While the game is not pushing the boundaries of the PlayStation 5, it still looks good considering all the action that is going on during the matches. You’ll have a fair amount of detail to all the maps, each having its own clutter, buildings, hazards and so on. Nonetheless, there are some clipping issues, some textures that pop in, and it’s not always clear if standing behind cover is also rendered as such for your enemies. On multiple occasions, the enemy insta-killed us when after a revive your character automatically stands up. When this happened, more than often the stand-up animation wasn’t even done. When dying, you somewhat zoom in on the person who killed you, and these were often behind a building or a wall, making it impossible for us to be killed from that vantage point.

We are not sure how the payment models of this game will turn out, and if it’s going to be a pay-to-win scenario. For the time being, you can buy specific troops to support the game, but they don’t really feel overpowered compared to others. It’s sometimes even easier to find extra soldiers for the troops that are free to unlock by simply playing the game. If it remains like this, without too many additional microtransactions, we’re actually looking at a fairly impressive game.

The current beta has two campaigns to play through, which allow you to level up different squads and handle a variety of different weapons. While in a way very similar, these campaigns add a lot more (re)play value to the game, by being able to level up and upgrade so many different troops. The troops that were given to us with the aforementioned paid bundle were already fully leveled and that is the only remark we could give about the paid content. Some may argue that in this format there is no ‘joy’ in leveling these troops yourself. Then again, the upgraded squad did not feel any more powerful than the others, even with their unique weapon(s). It’s basically a case of personal preference in this scenario, but we didn’t mind having one less squad to slowly grind to the max level.

Conclusion

Enlisted is a fairly nice experience, even with certain bugs and issues still present in the current build. We do hope that this won’t turn into one of those games where people sink in loads of money to get an edge on those who have a lower budget. These games are often prone to such tactics, albeit less so for Gaijin Entertainment than it is for the ‘Wargaming’ developed games. Those looking for massive online WWII battles, be sure to keep a close eye on this one. We enjoyed it but it’s too soon to properly estimate how the payment models will evolve for this one.

Ibuki

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