There are plenty of games that claim to let you experience World War II, but most of them put you in the shoes of one soldier fighting through a linear campaign and call it a day. Enlisted does something genuinely different. Instead of a single hero cutting through a battlefield, you command an entire squad — multiple soldiers, each with their own specialization, all responsive to your decisions in real time. It’s closer to actually leading a unit in one of the most consequential conflicts in history than anything else running right now, and the scale of each battle reflects that ambition in a way that’s immediately apparent from the first time you drop into a match.
Here’s a proper look at what Enlisted actually offers, what you can invest in to get the most out of the experience, and why the store is worth exploring rather than ignoring.
What Kind of Game This Is
Enlisted is a free-to-play MMO squad-based shooter set in World War II, available on PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X and S, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5. The free-to-play part is genuine rather than a lure for a wall of locked content — you can progress through the game, build your armies, and participate in all the major game modes without spending anything. What the store offers is a way to accelerate that experience, access unique squads with rare equipment, and support continued development while getting meaningful in-game advantages in return.
The battles themselves are genuinely massive. Hundreds of soldiers, tanks, and aircraft participate in each match, and because every player commands a squad of AI-controlled soldiers rather than just one character, the sense of scale on the battlefield is consistent rather than just a visual trick. When you lose a soldier, you switch to another member of your squad and keep fighting — the rhythm of the game feels closer to commanding a unit than playing a typical FPS, and that distinction is what separates it from the field.
The Four Nations — Your Army, Your Choice
Enlisted is built around four countries: the USA, Germany, the USSR, and Japan. Each has its own unique soldiers, weapons, armored vehicles, and aircraft that reflect the actual equipment used by those nations during the war. You can play one nation, two, or all four — each is a separate army you build and develop through a research tree, and they fight on historically appropriate fronts against appropriate opponents.
This matters more than it might seem at first glance because the playstyle, aesthetic, and strategic feel of each nation is genuinely distinct. German heavy armor is different from Soviet doctrine which is different from the American approach to combined arms in the Pacific — and the game reflects those differences in how each army plays. The updated matchmaking system pairs historical opponents on appropriate maps, so the USSR fights Germany in Berlin and Stalingrad, the USA faces Japan in the Pacific, and the fronts you play on match the countries you’ve chosen.
The Fronts — Where the Battles Happen
Enlisted covers the key fronts of the Second World War. Normandy puts you in the summer 1944 landings and the brutal hedgerow fighting that followed. Moscow captures the winter battles on the Eastern Front. Stalingrad covers the urban combat in one of the most intense sieges of the war. The Pacific front covers island-hopping across multiple Pacific Theater locations. Tunisia brings North Africa into the mix. Berlin closes the European war in the rubble of the Nazi capital.
Each front has its own map design, environmental conditions, and visual language — the snow and mud of Moscow feels completely different from the beachheads and jungles of the Pacific, which feels completely different from the urban destruction of Stalingrad. The attention to detail extends to soldier uniforms varying between fronts, which is the kind of care for historical authenticity that the game’s core community consistently appreciates.
Squads and What Makes Them Central to Everything
The squad system is the core mechanical innovation in Enlisted, and understanding it is key to understanding what the store is actually offering when it sells premium squads. In each battle, you bring multiple squads with you — infantry squads, engineer squads, tank crews, aircraft pilots, and various specialist configurations. Each squad type is effective in specific combat situations, carries appropriate weapons for its role, and has soldiers with class-specific perks that develop as you play.
The squad system means a single battle involves you rotating through different specialists as the tactical situation demands — switching from your infantry squad to your tank crew when armor is needed, pulling in your engineer squad when fortifications need to go up, tapping your sniper squad when the enemy has a position that needs picking apart from distance. The depth of this system is what gives Enlisted its strategic dimension above the raw shooting.
What the Store Offers — An Honest Look
The Gaijin store and in-game shop offer several categories of purchase for Enlisted players who want to enhance or accelerate their experience.
Premium squads are the main draw, and they’re worth understanding properly. These are squads with unique or rare weapon loadouts — weapons that aren’t available to standard research tree units, variants that existed historically but weren’t issued widely, experimental weapons, and collector’s items from the war. Premium squads earn double the Silver and experience points in every battle, which means every game you play with them is contributing twice as much to your overall progression across all four nations. They also get a dedicated squad slot in your battle lineup — a slot added specifically and exclusively for premium units, so bringing a premium squad to battle doesn’t require dropping one of your regular squads. The value of this is significant for regular players: more battlefield diversity, more Silver income per match, and access to weapons that make each battle feel genuinely different from a standard loadout.
Gold is the premium currency, used to purchase premium squads, premium account time, additional squad slots, squad cosmetics, and certain chests containing customization items. Gold can be purchased in various amounts depending on how much you want to invest, and it accumulates without expiring.
The Premium Account is a time-based subscription that boosts Silver and experience earned in every battle across your entire account, not just from premium squads. It stacks with the premium squad bonus, so a premium squad played under a premium account is earning significantly more per battle than either provides independently. Premium account is available in multiple durations, and during sales — which happen regularly across major holidays and in-game events — it’s routinely discounted by half for longer subscription options.
Starter Packs are designed for new players specifically. They include soldiers with pre-upgraded weapons, Gold, a short premium account period, and equipment like first aid kits and explosives — the kind of contents that let you skip the early-game unfamiliarity period and play with confidence from the first session rather than spending the first dozen games figuring out what’s actually useful.
Chests are cosmetic containers purchasable for Gold, introduced with the Operation Neptune update as a way to customize squads with premium and event cosmetics. These are appearance items rather than gameplay advantages.
The Research Tree and How Premium Speeds It Up
The current version of Enlisted uses branching research trees for each nation, covering weapons, vehicles, soldiers, and equipment. You progress through the tree by earning Silver in battles — the more Silver you earn per match, the faster your armies develop. Because premium squads and premium accounts both boost Silver income meaningfully, investing in them has a direct, compounding effect on how quickly your armies reach their full potential.
The research trees also have multiple branches, meaning you’re choosing which areas to develop rather than following a single linear path. This gives each army a sense of personality based on how you’ve built it, and it means the investment you make in Silver-boosting premium items translates into genuinely more choices for how your armies evolve.
User-Generated Content and the World Beyond WWII
One of the more underrated aspects of Enlisted is the built-in custom mod editor and the user-generated content it enables. Officially, the game covers WWII — but the modding community has created missions involving walking robots, other planets, modern warfare, and various experimental game modes that have nothing to do with 1939-1945. These play in multiplayer alongside the main game, and they’re free to access. The Fully Armed mode is one example of an officially sanctioned mode that operates beyond the standard WWII setting. The game’s design makes this possible by building flexibility into the engine from the start, and the result is a game that can be more than a historical simulator when the community feels like doing something different.
Sales, Temporary Squads, and When to Buy
The sale calendar in Enlisted is consistent and predictable enough to be worth planning around. Major holidays — New Year, May holidays, summer — reliably bring substantial discounts across premium squads and premium account, with deals on both in-game Gold purchases and direct store acquisitions. During the most recent sale events, premium squads have been discounted by meaningful percentages, and premium account options have been half-priced for longer durations.
Temporary squads are a recurring mechanic in the store — unique premium units that return to the shop for limited windows, sometimes with their own discounts on top of the sale. These units are genuinely rare; when their availability window closes, they’re not accessible until the next scheduled return. For collectors and players who like having the most historically interesting or visually distinctive units available, tracking these return windows is worth doing.
Why It’s Worth Spending on Enlisted
The clearest case for spending in Enlisted is the double Silver income from premium squads combined with the Silver boost from a premium account. If you’re planning to play regularly, the speed at which you can develop multiple nations’ research trees when both bonuses are active compared to playing entirely free is genuinely significant — the difference between reaching top-tier equipment in reasonable time versus a very long grind. The dedicated premium squad slot means this doesn’t come at a tactical cost either, since you’re adding to your battle lineup rather than replacing anything.
Beyond the progression mechanics, the premium squads themselves are a genuine reason to browse the store — the weapons they carry are often historically unusual, visually distinctive, and mechanically interesting in ways that standard research tree units aren’t. If you care about WWII history and equipment authenticity, the premium catalog is worth exploring for the same reasons you’d be interested in the game at all. Getting a squad armed with a rare variant weapon from a specific factory or a prototype that never made it to mass production is the kind of detail that makes Enlisted a genuinely interesting game to invest in rather than just another shooter.