LifeisXbox’s Enlisted review | I open my eyes as water splashes my face. Behind me, I can hear the soft prayers of my companions. In front of me, through the slits of the landing boat, I saw the bunkers. I just knew, that even before we landed on the beach? Sniper will have picked off a few of us. Would I be one of them? Or will I get the chance to show what true American mettle and training look like? The first whistle… We’re about to disembark. Looking at my gun and giving it the final look-over I smile. Yup, I’ll show that Nazi scum, just you wait..! I turn around to give my squad a pep talk and … The words that I formulated in my head just melted away and I knew then and there. I was doomed. Kowalski was teabagging a fish. Pedro was aiming at the sky. And … My god, Feltman was running sideways against the side of the boat. Sigh … *disconnect*. Yes, Ladies and Gentlemen. Prepare yourself, because this is Enlisted! The Battlefield competitor created by DarkFlow Software and released on the Xbox Series S|X and PC. Enlisted is a squad-based Online FPS shooter that looks like it took quite a bit of inspiration out of the World of … series combined with Battlefield. While still in an ongoing state of “being worked on”, it already released as a full release for quite a while now. Most of the time this is a bad omen because developers tend to ditch their efforts after such a release. But believe me that this is not the case for DarkFlow! Ready to find out how our experience was? Then strap in, because this is our review of Enlisted!
We played Enlisted for 12 hours on Xbox Series X. This game is also available on Playstation 5 and PC
What we liked!
- Graphics | Enlisted offers you 2 graphic modes. Performance or Visual. I played on performance because I just love those higher FPS rates. But that doesn’t mean you’ll lose a lot of visual artistry! On either Visual mode or Performance, your eyes will be treated to a true feast. Both of these don’t suffer from FPS drops whatsoever (or at least, not to my knowledge at least). They really optimized this for the Series X (visually, there are some glitches still in the game). I cannot vouch for the Series S, but on the Series X it’s just a beautiful game to gander at, and I cannot wait for what the future brings on the visuals department!
- Sound | Sound truly is one of the make-or-break elements in a game, but Enlisted passes the class with flying colors. The guns sound as if the sound designers cracked off a shot right next to a boom mic, the environmental sounds immerse you in a chaotic battlefield combining everything into the perfect amalgamation of immersion and real to life gunfire. Kudos guys!
- Amazing Developer | DarkFlow Software truly is an amazing developer, honestly. They are constantly interacting with their community and are always on the lookout on how to improve Enlisted and giving us, the players, a better playing experience. With patches and hotfixes releasing on a nearly weekly basis, I got to commend them for their dedication to the game. So, DarkFlow? I tip my hat to you, dear sirs!
- Expansive | Enlisted is in each meaning of the word, massive. From their squad selection to the customization possibilities. Even maps! Firstly, you’ll never get that “Oh great, it’s that squad so obviously, they’ll have that loadout and so on and so forth”. DarkFlow Software saw to that and made it possible for everyone to customize the hell out of each squad. I wonder how many possibilities there actually are. That gives each enemy squad in every game that wonderfully unique feeling. But wait! There’s more. If you’ve ever had the opportunity to join an online community of a just-released FPS game (like COD or BF), you’ll know that maps are sometimes a missing commodity. Sometimes releasing with just a few decent maps, and remaining that way up until the first DLC or content patch. Well, not in Enlisted! This comes with 4 campaigns. Each campaign has its own set of maps which aren’t anything to sneeze at either. All of these battlefields are big and are (most of them) filled with objectives for you to capture, destroy, or whatever mode you’d be playing. But being this expansive also comes at a cost… Read more in my somewhere in-between part.
Somewhere between
- Maybe too Expansive ?| While I completely applaud DarkFlow Software‘s endeavors in bringing us a massive game with countless maps. I do tend to notice that they also overstretch themselves quite a bit in certain maps. Some actually tend to be void of anything worthwhile to see or fight around. Giving the impression that some of these are just put in the rotation to be “filler” content. The only place that I want to see filler content in, frankly, is my anime. And not in my games. I would rather have fewer but more thought out maps, than more but with nothing to add than just “being there because we had to fill up a certain amount of map types”.
- Some glitches may occur | Note: This is drastically different from player to player and unit to unit. I had some serious glitches which I shared with our Lord and Majesty DaeJim. He had 0 issues, while my experience was drastically ruined at certain points due to glitches.
I had numerous glitches occur. These ranged from world assets suddenly disappearing on my end, allowing me to see people in buildings and even able to kill them through the walls as if I had some wallhack running. Climbing up ladders where I got loop-stuck, which means that I continuously started climbing up a ladder and then dropping. But the worst glitch I had, was when I crouched underneath a dead tank, and I got stuck in the carcass of the same tank. My visuals suddenly started to freak out, and I couldn’t move any more until the tank despawned. Again, for some reason, this doesn’t affect everyone and seems to be player-based. But with a developer that is continuously patching the game, this will surely become thing of the past before you know it! - Cumbersome | If you haven’t played a game like World of Tanks before? Then you may get the feeling as if you’re in way over your head. Each campaign has its own set of squads, guns, and battle pass routes. To keep up with everything. Each squad has its own set of upgrades, and each soldier in each squad has its own set of improvements that you get to choose from. You get my drift by now. I get a complex system, but this is just… Way too complex for a simple shooter that otherwise doesn’t really give any tactical advantage other than unlocking certain soldier types that are locked behind squad types…
- Floating guns | Shooting sometimes tends to feel as if you’re shooting a hot-air gun instead of a real gun. I don’t know why this happens, but it does. I found this quite strange as this isn’t an occurrence that happens often. I could go one life without this happening, and the other where I got the feeling as if my guns did 0 damage, and aiming felt as if I had a brick stuck at the end of my barrel.
What we disliked
- Air supperiority | Pilots. God damn these suckers! There’s nothing I hated more in Enlisted than the Airplanes. These things could simply destroy anything that dared pop its ugly head up. And while I don’t fault them for it? My issue with them is the fact that they have nearly no competition or rivalry to combat them. AA guns aren’t fixed elements on the map but are (as far as I know of) locked behind a skill that the Engineering class has. If your entire team then has 0 engineers… Well, good luck, I guess? Then there’s almost nothing you can do against the enemy pilots.
- A.I. | My intro already should have given you an idea about what I was talking about. Yes, ladies and gents. Enlisted’s A.I. could as well not be present at all. They have a couple of issues that currently still plague the game. Their pathing is horrendous. Your squad members (if you choose to play with a squad instead of playing solo) rarely follow the safest path from where they were to where you are going. Most of the time I noticed that my squad died in the first minute we were deployed. At other times they wouldn’t shoot at enemies that were right in front of me. I know that A.I. is a tough thing to program. But if this is the current state of an A.I.? Leave it out until you’ve got it on point..!
CONCLUSION
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