The typically gritty world of Rainbow Six is getting a colorful makeover. Ubisoft just revealed the franchise’s latest spinoff, a mobile game called Rainbow Six: Smol that shrinks down the tactical action and adds a whole lot of goofy personality. The game is available now through Netflix games on both iOS and Android.
“We saw an opportunity here to widen the audience a bit, with a more approachable take on the Rainbow Six universe,” creative director Renaud Forestié tells The Verge. The game features what Forestié describes as the pillars of the franchise — which include the Operator characters and destructible environments to open up new strategies — but introduces a top-down viewpoint and a cutesy art style. You can get a taste for it in the trailer above.
The game was developed by an appropriately small team of 10 people at Ubisoft, and according to Forestié, Netflix was involved from very early on, meaning the game was designed around the subscription platform and not monetization. “That let us not have to spend energy on microtransactions and ads so we could focus on the player experience,” he explained.
Smol is part of an ongoing collaboration between Ubisoft and Netflix, which includes the animated series Captain Laserhawk and upcoming adaptations of Assassin’s Creed and Splinter Cell. The news also comes as Netflix continues to make gaming a larger focus. Most recently, the streamer released the GTA trilogy through its service, which it called its biggest gaming launch so far.