Nekome: Nazi Hunter – A Game That Delivers Brutal Stealth with Creative Kills and Deadly Enemy Encounters

There are plenty of World War II games out there, but Nekome: Nazi Hunter is taking the setting in a very different direction. Rather than putting you in the middle of a traditional military campaign, the game follows Vano Nastasu, a young Romani man whose family is brutally murdered by Nazi soldiers. 

Nekome: Nazi Hunter is a single-player, third-person action game currently planned for the first quarter of 2027. You travel from New York into Nazi-occupied Europe, tracking down the soldiers responsible for destroying Vano's life. The game combines stealth with close-quarters combat, giving you the freedom to scout enemy positions, plan your approach, and decide when it is time to strike.

The latest gameplay gives you a much better idea of how that formula is supposed to work. 

At first, the game's brutal combat might make it look like a straightforward action game where you enter an area and eliminate everyone in your path. However, the developers are building something much more open-ended around those fights, with multiple ways to approach enemies and different routes through occupied areas.

That is where Nekome: Nazi Hunter starts to feel less like a conventional World War II action game and more like an assassination sandbox. You can study patrol routes, work out where enemies are positioned, quietly remove individual soldiers, create distractions, and use the environment to prepare an area before a fight begins. 

Stealth isn't designed simply as a system that forces you to avoid combat from beginning to end. Instead, you can use it to put yourself in a better position before the fighting starts. You can sneak into enemy territory, learn how the guards move, take out isolated soldiers, and create openings before deciding whether to stay hidden or launch a direct assault.

Getting caught doesn’t mean you failed either. The scenario can just move from stealth to combat if an enemy spots you, allowing you to deal with the ramifications of your previous choices. That means you can deliberately combine both approaches rather than treating stealth and combat as completely separate playstyles.

You might quietly eliminate several guards, move into a better position, set up the environment, and then start a fight on your own terms. Alternatively, you can take a more direct route and fight your way through an area if you decide that sneaking around isn't worth the effort. 

The stealth mechanics themselves are fairly easy to understand. Vano can crouch and hide when enemies aren't looking at him. He can use a whistle to distract guards and manipulate their position. You can also sense enemies through walls, giving you enough information to plan your movement before blindly walking around a corner.

Silent takedowns let you remove isolated enemies without immediately alerting everyone nearby. 

These individual mechanics aren't particularly unusual for a stealth game, but the more interesting part comes from how enemy awareness is supposed to carry through an encounter. If you make mistakes, the consequences can continue to affect what happens later.

Enemies don't simply forget about an incident moments after losing sight of you. Their awareness is shared and persistent, meaning careless kills and poorly planned attacks can change the situation around you. 

That makes preparation especially important because your stealth decisions can directly affect the combat that follows. Once you are discovered, Nekome: Nazi Hunter shifts into a much more aggressive style of gameplay. Instead of relying primarily on firearms, the game puts considerable emphasis on brutal close-quarters fighting.

Enemies can flank Vano and attack from different directions, making you think about position instead of just attacking the nearest enemy. You can parry incoming strikes, break the guard of defensive enemies, chain attacks together, and use powerful kicks to create space. 

The developers are also experimenting with a system that allows you to slow combat down and chain targeted attacks into cinematic sequences. That could become one of the game's defining mechanics because it gives you more control over how fights unfold. 

The game's inspiration from grindhouse cinema also explains why the violence is such a major part of the experience. 

Nekome: Nazi Hunter isn't attempting to present World War II as a purely realistic military simulation, with the developers instead using the historical setting as the foundation for a much more stylized revenge story. The combat and finishing moves are designed around that grindhouse influence, giving the game a deliberately visceral identity.

Guns are available, but they aren't meant to replace the rest of the combat system. If an enemy has a firearm, Vano can take it from them and use the ammunition that remains. Because ammunition is limited, you have to think about when a gun is worth using instead of simply relying on firearms throughout an entire mission.

You could take a weapon from an enemy, discover that it only has a few bullets remaining, use those shots against the most dangerous soldiers, and then return to melee combat. That limited-resource approach fits into the larger idea that you are supposed to improvise during encounters rather than entering every mission with a massive arsenal.

The environment itself is another major part of the combat system. Nazi-occupied areas contain pipes, tools, hazards, and other objects that can be used as improvised weapons, allowing you to turn the surroundings against your enemies. You can combine these environmental options with your fists, blades, guns, traps, and different routes through an area.

This makes the environment more than just scenery. If you take the time to examine an area before attacking, you can potentially find objects that give you an advantage once the fighting begins. The idea is that you should be looking at the entire location as part of your arsenal instead of relying only on the weapons Vano carries.

The fear and notoriety systems could make that approach even more important. 

Your brutality and unpredictability can influence enemy morale, meaning the way you deal with one group can affect how the remaining soldiers behave. Some enemies may panic, hesitate, or run away, but others can be aggressive and rush at you.

That creates another layer on top of the combat because killing enemies isn't only about reducing the number of opponents in front of you. The way you eliminate them can potentially change the behavior of everyone else around you. If you establish a reputation for being unpredictable and brutal, some soldiers may become too intimidated to enter an area at all.

The story gives these mechanics a personal reason to exist. Vano isn't simply fighting because he has been sent behind enemy lines as part of a military operation, and he isn't trying to win the entire war single-handedly. His objective is much more focused, as he tracks down Hitler's hyenas, the group of Nazi soldiers responsible for murdering his family.

That personal motivation is what separates Nekome: Nazi Hunter from a standard World War II shooter. You follow a person whose whole life is defined by grief and revenge. You see the conflict from Vano's eyes. 

The latest gameplay also makes it clear that the developers aren't trying to give you one predetermined way to experience that revenge story. 

You can approach enemy territory carefully, plan your route, manipulate patrols, use stealth to gain an advantage, and then decide how you want to finish the encounter. If the situation collapses into chaos, the combat systems are designed to let you fight your way through it rather than treating detection as an automatic failure.

ProbablyMonsters has confirmed that Nekome: Nazi Hunter is targeting an early 2027 release, with the game planned for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. The game is also already available for wishlisting on PC through Steam and the Epic Games Store.

There is still time for the developers to refine the systems before launch, but the latest look at Nekome: Nazi Hunter makes its overall direction much clearer. You're getting a World War II revenge game that combines stealth, environmental improvisation, limited firearms, and aggressive melee combat instead of following the usual shooter formula.