You ever wonder why Enlisted feels… off? Not just the usual chaos of war, but something deeper, something wrong. I’ve played a lot of WW2 shooters—Battlefield 1942, Call of Duty WaW—but Enlisted? It’s different. It’s like a fever dream, a war that never ends, fought by soldiers who don’t seem to belong.
At first, I thought it was just a quirky design choice. A Federov Avtomat appearing in the Battle of Berlin? PPS43s in Moscow? Chinese soldiers in North Africa? Prototypes like the Ho-Ri and AS44, that never saw real combat - let alone mass deployment - suddenly flooding the battlefield like they were always meant to be there. It felt weird, like history was bending in ways it shouldn’t.
But then, the thought hit me—what if Enlisted isn’t just a game about war? What if it’s war itself, in its purest, most nightmarish form? A war that never ends because, it can’t.
I’ve started paying more attention. The way soldiers spawn—emerging all at once out of nowhere in a cluster of flesh, sometimes among the corpses of their comrades. The eerie silence between battles, how the world just… resets. Like a stage being prepared for the next act. The way you can keep fighting, wave after wave - reappearing or resurrecting, even, countless times to fight over a piece of decimated land - even when logic says you should be dead.
And the weapons. Oh, the weapons. It’s like time has no meaning here. A Soviet conscript might be wielding an experimental assault rifle that never left the prototype stage. A Japanese abomination, nowhere close to being made that terrorizes those it faces.These weapons weren’t supposed to meet on the battlefield. But here, they do.
That’s when I realized—this isn’t a war. This is purgatory.
The soldiers in Enlisted? They’re already dead. The battlefield? It’s their prison. These men—hundreds, if not thousands of them—are souls trapped in a war that never happened, doomed to fight forever in a place outside of time. Maybe they were cowards in life perhaps explaining my teammates, deserters, men who betrayed their comrades. Or maybe they were just unlucky, caught in the gears of history and left to rot. Either way, they’re here now, and they’ll never leave.
The anachronistic weapons? They’re not historical inaccuracies. They’re echoes—fragments of wars across time, bleeding together into one endless (like the battle pass) conflict. Some say hell is fire and brimstone, but what if it’s something worse? What if it’s a battlefield where you never truly die, where the war rages on, and no one even realizes they’ve been fighting for eternity?
Next time you play Enlisted, pay attention. Watch how the soldiers move. Listen to the way the gunfire fades into eerie silence between spawns. Look at the weapons in your hands, at the ones lying in the dirt, rusted yet new. And ask yourself—how long have they been here? How long have you?
And most importantly…
Will we ever leave?
