Nekome: Nazi Hunter is a third-person action game developed and published by ProbablyMonsters, and headed up by Jeronimo Barrera, who is best known as having been a two decade-long employee at Rockstar, departing there as a VP of Development in 2018. In a shift from the games his former employer is so well-known for, Nekome: Nazi Hunter is a linear, stage-based game, where you have specific objectives to complete before moving on to the next level. In my roughly 30 minutes with the game, I found myself in both a Nazi dinner party and an American-Nazi (meaning WW2 Nazis who are in America, though it wasn’t clear if they were Americans or Germans) propaganda office, with a single goal: kill Nazis.
You play as Vano Nastasu, a Romani man, whose family was murdered by the Nazis. In my demo, and the inciting incident for the propaganda office assault, the adoptive father figure of Vano, Harold, is murdered by Nazis and Vano chases after them to fulfill Harold’s dying wish. To be clear, there’s really no pursuit, Vano is placed at the start of the next stage, where you walk up and practice your fighting some more. Once inside, you’re introduced to the stealth mechanics of the game, consisting of crouching, stealth kills, and that’s about it. While exploring the propaganda office, the option to burn Nazi symbols, such as flags, shows up when you walk near them, and that caused a side objective to pop up. I’m unsure what the reward was for burning them, but there were different tiers, like burning one, then five, and so on.
The combat in the game almost what could best be described as a janky, Arkham-lite combo/counter style. Vano’s primary weapon is a knife, which he uses to brutalize his enemies, both with regular kills as well as finishing moves; however, when choosing the option to desecrate the corpse, he just curb stomps them so the head explodes. Vano has access to other weapons found in the environment, like lamps and chairs, plus the occasional gun dropped by the enemies, but they all have that same, awkward feeling to them. There’s not much impact in the combat, despite the visual flare. The game is not scheduled to release until 2027, so hopefully this is something they can fine tune, but right now, engaging in the hit and counter combat was slightly annoying and kind of dull.
Unfortunately, the same can be said for the aforementioned stealth. It works very well, and I mean that in both the “how did I get caught?!” and “how did I not get caught?!” ways. One time, I tried to use the whistle to distract a civilian, unsure if I would get detected by her seeing me, and the Nazi behind me heard it instead, so I thought I was caught, but I slightly moved myself around a corner and he walked right past me. The stealth kills also have a weird range where I was never sure when I was close enough to do it, meaning I was always risking getting caught. There’s also no way to hide bodies, but rather than set off an alarm, it just makes the nearby enemies run around like headless chickens for a bit, and after slaughtering a whole floor, the next floor down had no idea I was there.
I don’t want to sound overly harsh of this game; I think that there’s potential be make a good game here, and there’s definitely love and craft put into this game and into the tale being told in particular (though I wasn’t crazy about the voice acting, either). That said, this game must still be very early if this is the demo that was shown to the press and it is, seemingly, the opening of the game. I think that if it makes it out next year, it’s a late 2027 game at best. ProbablyMonsters has a solid concept to work off of, I just hope they give it the time it needs to be finished.
