Found Myself Slowly Falling Back In Love With 'Battlefield'.
Back In The Good Old Days
There's something about getting older that makes you continually year for the 'good old days' (even if the good old days weren't quite as good as you think they were)!
Such is my current fondness for Battlefield 2-like games. This began when I came across a game called 'EASY RED 2' on sale on STEAM, it was so cheap that I felt it would be rude of me not to give it a try, plus a few of the YouTube gamers had been raving about it (I suspect they were sponsored)! 😆
I should explain that I was one of those carbogens who complained bitterly when DICE tinkered with the Battlefield game format when they brought out Battlefield 3. BF3, BF4 and subsequent Battlefield games never seemed to capture the thrill of BF2 for me (and some others). Yes, I admit that perhaps it had something to do with the initial novelty of BF2, but there were some changes to the game that did make all BF games thereafter - we suspected - more 'CoD-like'.
Anyway, I recently tried to recapture that nostalgia by first trying the affirmations Easy Red 2, and then by - even - sparking up my copy of the original Battlefield 2 - which I was astonished to find actually ran under WIN11 - to see if I could identify why I missed the magic sauce that BF2 had.
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| Above: You still can play the original BF2 in a limited form. Sadly, at the moment there doesn't appear to be a way to play the game online in a multiplayer mode as the third party servers seem to be temporarily non-functioning, so it's just single player. |
Long story short, it seems what I missed the big multiplayer online games...
Fast Forward to ENLISTED
So, I started to look around for a Battlefield-like game that was current and had a lively player based and that was themed around World War 2 (I had been watching a lot of videos showing play from Battlefield V and remembered that out of all the recent Battlefield titles I had the most fun playing this one).
It was almost tempting to look at some of the more hardcore WW2 multiplayer shooters - like Hell Let Loose or Red Orchestra 2 - but I wanted something that was a little more accessible for the new player. I'm a bit too old and set in my ways now to go down the complicated ARMA-like quasi-sim tactical shooter route, I want something a bit more casual that I can easily jump in and out of.
Above: Having raved about Enlisted on my Facebook page, my friend Spider
decided to give it a go and produced this clip of some of the action.
But, just as I thought that there wasn't a more 'fun' first person shooter themed on World War 2 out there I happened across a video showcasing ENLISTED.
Now this game kinda went under my - and a lot of peoples' - radar. It seemed to get some lukewarm reviews initially and has struggled along, but then picked up again recently.
The main issue with it, as far as I can see, is that it appears to be - more or less - War Thunder but with infantry added. In fact, it is part of the same developer's stable as War Thunder, Gaijan Games.
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| Above: As with Gaijan's other game - War Thunder - grinding for better weapons and equipment is a big party of ENLISTED. |
It's a slightly different approach to the way DICE approached infantry warfare - where you played an individual soldier who worked as part of a larger team. Enlisted, instead, works with squads being the core component fighting the battle and you play *all* the individual soldiers in the squad, one soldeir at a time!
Yes, it sounds a bit quirky, but just think of it as you having a second, third, forth - and so on - life. When you play through all the individual members in your chosen squad (i.e. they get killed) you then transfer to your next available squad (in this way it's like War Thunder, where you have a reserve of several back up vehicles) .
It takes a bit of getting used to and the repeated teleportation from one soldier in your squad to another can be a little disorientating at times. But it also has a very obvious advantage as well...
Whereas in Battlefield where once your active soldier is killed you have to start your battle to the objective - on respawning - from square one (unless you have a convenient squad spawn point), in Enlisted, when you die, or whenever you chose, you can take up the position of any of your squad members - right on the spot.
Above: Some of my early gameplay as I climb the experience & technology
tree. But even at the lowest level I found the game exciting and fun.
Anyway, this is just a very simple introduction to the game as I am very much just a beginner and haven't worked out all the tricks with this one yet.
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