When I received the email asking if I wanted to check out Nekome: Nazi Hunter, I had to take a closer look. I’m a sucker for anything World War II oriented, and the irreverent tone seemed correctly placed. Now that I’ve tried Nekome, albeit for a very short time, I have quite a few thoughts, and a bit of concern.
Nekome: Nazi Hunter is a story of revenge. Our protagonist, a young Romani man named Vano Natasu, is out to kill the Nazi soldiers that killed his family. As is easy to surmise, this will lead him on a bloody journey. My demo provided a bit of narrative in a segment where a friend is killed, but everything I touched largely involved the gameplay. An easy comparison in tone would be Inglorious Bastards – it takes itself seriously, but the campy nature of the violence takes the edge off.
The choice of art design is one of my favorite things about Nekome: Nazi Hunter. It’s almost Team Fortress 2-esque, leaning into a near cartoony aesthetic. Considering how intense this game gets, it works similarly to the tone in dulling its sharp qualities, keeping it from going full The Last of Us.
As for the gameplay, what I played was a bit repetitive. You’ll move between rooms in an area, kill Nazis through by stabbing them repeatedly with your knife or using the occasional gun you find. Things get gory, with each cut shedding blood all over the room and Vano. The issue lies in the execution; you more or less button mash until a finisher prompt appears, and you’re doing this over and over again. There isn’t a lot that mixes things up outside of a couple of different animations for said finisher either. If I feel that way after twenty minutes, I worry about how I’ll feel after a few hours.
Similarly, stealth doesn’t offer a lot of variation. In the few sections I attempted sneaking around, you go up behind someone and hit the takedown button, which responds with a finisher animation. It got to the point where I didn’t see the value of skulking around, it was arguably easier to just fight whatever foe lay in front of me.
Confusing me even more might be the super move. As you take out Nazis, Vano builds a meter for a “tag and execute” ability. It’s not unlike the one in Assassin’s Creed Mirage, letting you zoom to each enemy and brutally murder them. What perplexes me is this – how can Vano do this? Is it a narrative element I wasn’t privy to? Is it just there because it's fun and useful?
I left my preview with more questions than answers, and I hope ProbablyMonsters will take some time to think over what they’re trying to deliver with this game, or at least offer more context. Nekome: Nazi Hunter has some interesting ideas, but it's going to take some work to flesh them out and clean them up. Considering the team is looking at an early 2027 release, I’d implore them to not commit to any window and instead take the time to do Nekome right.
