Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory: a 32-slot trench that doesn't always fill up

Built around five roles and two teams at once, it asks for company — go in alone and you run into empty servers or ones overrun by bots.

Six maps, five roles, and a win that takes people

No one wins a round of Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory on their own — and that reliance on whoever's on the other side of the screen is what separates the players who praise the game from the ones who give up on it. There are always two sides, Axis and Allies, working through the objectives the win itself demands, one map at a time. Six maps recreate the settings of real World War II battles. Each match holds up to 32 players, split across five roles — engineer, medic, soldier, field ops and covert ops — that only make sense when they slot into one another. The game supplies the stage; filling the seats is up to you and whoever you bring along.

None of the five roles can complete an objective alone, and it's in that forced meshing of strangers that the game's real gamble lies. The project is the work of the studio Splash Damage, published by Bethesda Softworks LLC; the version GOG keeps in its catalog lists October 20, 2022 as its date on the store itself.

Light to install, hard to put down

The players who reviewed the game the moment it landed on GOG, on October 20, 2022, all describe the same scene: friends gathered on the same local network, rediscovering that a lightweight install can carry a whole evening. You go in expecting to waste time memorizing the map, and find that the simple controls carry anyone who has never played; the community, meanwhile, has turned out so many mods that the servers themselves load them on the spot, with no extra install.

Among the praise there's also a stopgap for anyone playing without company: one review suggests filling the server with the artificial intelligence dubbed Fritzbot, which takes on objectives and mimics a human presence well enough to keep a match going, and points out that there's even a separate, open-source version, called ET: Legacy, for those who want the same game without leaning on the original. But one review from September 18, 2025, the most recent of the bunch, owns up to the cost of that loyalty: the player base has shrunk against what it once was.

The two ways to end up alone

If you go into Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory without knowing what you'll find on the other side, the negative reviews lay out the two ways to come away disappointed. One player reviewed the game on October 27, 2024 and gave it a low score for one technical reason and one structural one: the anti-cheat system kept freezing on him, and on top of that an experience system penalizes newcomers, making the learning curve steeper than it needs to be. Another, on November 16, 2022, went looking for machine-controlled opponents to play solo, found none, couldn't get the game to run in full screen either, and closed the review by saying it just wasn't for him.

A case of its own, on September 5, 2025, complains about the exact opposite: the public servers he found were overrun with automated players and with unwanted messages floating across the screen. Added together, the three complaints trace an outline none of them drew alone: the game has no version that's yours alone — it borrows the presence of whoever's on the other side, and when that presence is missing or faked, the complaint stops being about a technical fault or a bot and becomes about company.

For those who show up with company lined up

Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory rewards those who arrive with company: a steady group, willing to memorize objectives and stick with a map until it clicks, finds a local-network party there that, going by the dates on the reviews themselves, has stayed on its feet from 2022 to 2025. Go in alone, chasing a public server and strangers, and you take the same gamble the reviews describe: you might land in an empty room, you might land in one overrun by machines pretending to be people — and neither is the collective contest the game promises. This isn't a game to fire up alone and judge on the spot; it's a game to call someone about before you install.