Overwatch is free on the PC for this weekend as grand finals kick-off

To celebrate and coincide with the grand finals of the Overwatch League, Blizzard is making the game free to play for all-comers this weekend.

And when we say this weekend, we mean a long weekend, starting on Thursday, July 26 at 11am PDT in the US (7pm in the UK, 4am July 27 AEST in Australia), running through until Monday, July 30 up until the end of the day, in other words 11:59 PDT (6:59am on Tuesday, July 31 in the UK, 4:59PM AEST in Australia).

Anyone with a Windows PC and a Battle.net account will be able to download and play Overwatch for free during this period with no requirements in terms of signup codes or other fuss.

Also note that if you subsequently decide to purchase Overwatch after the free weekend, you’ll get to keep any progress you’ve made in terms of levelling and unlocking stuff, which is always good.

Having a (wrecking) ball

As to the content available with this freebie, players will have access to the entire roster of 28 heroes – including newcomer ‘Wrecking Ball’ – along with 18 maps and a variety of gameplay modes, including quick play, along with custom games, and the arcade.

In short, you’re getting a pretty full Overwatch experience for the best part of five days, which is pretty nifty.

Meanwhile, as mentioned, this coincides with the Overwatch League’s grand finals taking place in New York, which sees London Spitfire face off against Philadelphia Fusion, with those two teams unexpectedly pulling off upsets against their respective favored division winners.

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Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).