This game was played on an Xbox Series X
Enlisted is the newest title from Cuisine Royale developer Darkflow Software. It takes the novel approach of having small player counts but putting each player into a squad with AI counterparts. CRSED: F.O.A.D. (originally known as Cuisine Royale) unlike this one allowed you to properly move and aim like someone who knew how to use their body properly. Instead, Enlisted takes the approach of “what if I woke up one day and had no idea how to use my limbs properly. The graphics are ok, the music is fine, and the guns can be genuinely fun to shoot. Is that enough to redeem this eventually free-to-play game though?
Like a Busted Marionette
I really cannot say enough bad things about the soldier movement in this game. Put aside the issues that come with a microtransaction heavy free-to-play title. There can be sporadic moments of fun. We were provided with a code that gave me a bevy of fully leveled soldiers during the game’s beta period. The full release saw a wipe that took them away, and I’ve yet to get them back. If this happened to me then I fear for any paying customers that bought the $30 US or $50 version of the game to get these leveled up soldiers. Update: the publisher helped us quickly remedy the missing premium soldiers and I’m thankful for their swift response. Shooting the guns feels good at times, and then randomly while holding a direction I’ll quickly and uncontrollably spin 45 degrees in that direction. It is infuriating and I have not been able to find a control option anywhere to stop it.
There is soldier combat, tank combat, and plane combat to be had in Enlisted. None of it is good. There are multiple maps for both current campaigns (4 are planned), none of these stand out either. Enlisted’s best parts are all thoroughly mediocre. Its worst parts are truly dreadful. The music is well made but standard world war 2 fare. Once again I go back to that soldier movement. Not only do you randomly swivel uncontrollably at times, but you are incredibly slow, everything you do feels like your player-controlled character is recovering from a severe concussion. This was done to make things feel more “realistic and tactical”, but it simply does not work.
A Rotten Microtransaction Future
This game wants you to grind to build up your squads. There are multiple sides in the campaigns, and you must build up your team for each of them. How can you do this more quickly? With money of course! Even then though you need to grind away to reach the proper level to be able to spend your money on things. The game is decently generous at times with unlocks but then you realize a gun unlock is only used for one person on one squad and you see how outfitting over 100 soldiers per side will take an incredibly long time. It’s pay two win in a way that ruins games for me, and it’s disappointing to see. Also as of the time of launch the game is crashing on me non-stop. I did not have this issue in the beta, and it may be due to me trying to use the Game DVR feature to get footage for the video version of this review. Hopefully, this will be fixed in time but after two days straight of hard crashes that turn my system off, I am forced to give up getting the footage I would like to so much of the video I’ll be using is from the beta. Honestly, though it is damned near the same game with some tightening up of the UI and tutorial so it’s not a big issue.
In Conclusion
I had hoped that the time spent in Game Preview would lead to Darkflow fixing the movement and aiming systems. I never had much hope for how the squad system would work with the free-to-play nature of the title, but if the gameplay were solid then I could still recommend giving it a shot. In the end though this is a bad playing, poorly set up, mediocre-looking game that you should avoid unless you’re desperate to go murder a bunch of poorly scripted AI with some friends. Though only since it’ll be free to play.
| Reviewed on | Xbox Series X |
| Available on | Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Playstation 4|5, Windows PC |
| Release Date | April 8th, 2021 |
| Developer | Darkflow Software |
| Publisher | Gaijin Distribution Kft |
| Rated | PEGI 16 |
Enlisted
Free to Play
Pros
- Guns can be fun to shoot
- Graphics aren't terrible
Cons
- Player movement is atrocious
- Balance with vehicles is non-existant
- Microtransactions and grinding Exp make things an odd version of pay to win
It is hard to distinguish, what is the worst in this game. The game is just a piece of shit.
Just dividing the score for any game into the different parts leave you with Gameplay, Economy, Balance, Community, Support to evaluate. How can I score all that? Zero.
Gameplay: you are playing in the fixed sequence of maps. You are tired with a particular bad map with zero option to win? You have to play it until the server would change it.
When you are first reading the overview, you are told that advanced AI will fulfil the battle with action and realistic behavior. Well, AI in this game is advanced in the way to kill itself. Walking over explosives, ignoring the enemy on knife-distance, running on the machine guns, zero pathfinding – all that you can easily see yourself. The best way to use your AI – is to put them well behind you, so if you are killed – you will resurrect in your squadmate. However, it is not a trivial task, because when your artificial idiot got distracted – he won’t follow your orders and simply die. It is not Artificial Intellect. It is Absolute Idiots.
Economy: two words. It sucks. Price of AAA-game for a half-sized squad with garbage guns? Sure. Regional pricing? Forget it. As the topping – during the beta test you have to pay if you want to early test the third campaign. And when no-one wanted to pay for that shit, devs almost immediately made a giveaway of 1000 slots “to test” – hah, not to test but to work as a meat loafs for those, who paid. They got the SMGs – you got the bolt-action rifle. Go winning, son!
Balance – there is no such thing as balance. As they called it “Asymmetric gearing” resulted in the situation, where Germans (Axis) are clearly boys to humiliate… just as like the USA in Normandy. There is no balance in SMG, in MG, in vehicles.. the list of those issue is endless. The way how devs balance their weapons is clearly illustrated by MG-38/40, which were the top-end guns by the Dec ’20, and became absolute trash in May ’21. As the Russian community grows, the USSR weapons are getting more and more imbalanced. What is the end? Zero human players in the Axis team, and here we go to…
Community. At the one end – all the kind of schoolkids playing is not that bad. The fact that from the 11000 of Xbox player only 48!! reached 20 lvl – is not also that bad. But the problem is, that for 5 of 10 players in the games are bots. You can check it after the match – 5 of 10 players in your team does not exist in the playerbase! They are damn bots. Pretty amusing result for 1 month past OBT, I suppose.
Support: best thing you can achieve on their official forum, right after you’d fill in the ticket for another glitch, bug or network error log – your topic will receive a sign “Similar problem” …. and it will be closed. The game EAC demand pretty much of your PC, won’t work if you don’t have some crucial Windows updates, and if you find that your i9 is using only once core – well, that is not their problem. They are earning money and designing another way to grab your $.
TL;DR. Cheap Battlefield clone, without any logics, tactics, long term goals, any sane progression, any balance – just without anything. Only bots, grind, and greedy devs – that is the Enlisted – the Game ™
this game fucking sucks, i tryed so much to simply login with everything correct and sed everything was fucking wrong.
Fucking game, Fucking creator, I hate this Fucking game!!!!!! Only with tanks can win the bastards, FUCKING CREATORRRR !!!!!!!!
FUCKING GAME, FUCKING CREATOR !!!!!!!!
reading this review let me think it’s 3 years old . this game has evolve a lot over the time .AI proved a lot , no more AI stuck in building and running everywhere. but when you think about it people can do a lot of dumb shit when youre shelled at by arty .
the dynamic of the game is very good . the upgrade logic behind the game is not easy to figure for the first 2-3 hours of game play but after a while you’ll get use to it .
i too had that same feeling and temptation of whining over the game when i got my ass kicked by AI many time
It is certainly a different game than when I reviewed it, lots of patches.