You won’t have long to get the best cybercrime game ever for free

Ubisoft Forward on Sunday, July 12 will feature some major title announcements and gameplay reveals, including more Assassin’s Creed Valhalla footage and a first look at the company’s upcoming sci-fi battle royale Hyper Scape. But the presentation won’t only be showcasing games: Ubisoft will also be giving away one of its best open-world games of all time.

Watch Dogs 2 will be free on PC during the Ubisoft Forward show starting on Sunday, July 12 at 3 p.m. Eastern, but because it's scheduled to last about 45 minutes, that's a very narrow window to claim this freebie.

All you need to do is create and sign into a Ubisoft account (which is also free) to claim the adventure game. The only catch is that gamers need to redeem Watch Dogs 2 before Ubisoft Forward ends. It should last at least an hour all-in-all but make sure you grab your copy as soon as it starts to avoid getting caught by surprise.

The game follows the cyber misadventures of Marcus Holloway, a hacker that’s affiliated with the anti-government hacking group DedSec in San Francisco. This hacker collective is working to take down the city’s highly advanced and very creepy ctOS surveillance system.

Throughout the game’s roughly 20-hour campaign you’ll have to plan and execute various heist and infiltration-style missions. You’ll use high-tech gadgets like drones capable of hacking computers from a distance and remote-control cars to gain access to government buildings. And you’ll more than likely need to engage in some third-person shooting when your master plan doesn’t exactly turn out how you envisioned.

This Mr. Robot-esque plot is complemented by the sprawling city of San Francisco you can explore on foot or on various vehicles. Players have free rein of the Bay Area, which really makes Watch Dogs 2 feel like a hacking-focused sibling of Grand Theft Auto 5.

Despite its clear similarities to one of Rockstar’s most successful games of all time, Watch Dogs 2 had a shaky start when it was released in November 2016. A majority of initial reviews noted that the game had frequent technical issues and animation glitches, which were eventually patched out.

Aside from its single-player story mode, Watch Dogs 2 also comes with an online mode where players can encounter other players wandering the streets of San Fransisco and complete missions with them in a co-op setting. There are also six different competitive multiplayer challenges, like Showd0wn, where two teams of two players are pitted against each other to either hack or protect information.

While Watch Dogs 2 never quite reached GTA 5 levels of popularity, Ubisoft announced that Watch Dogs 2 had sold 10 million copies as of May 2020. Now, with the impending launch of Watch Dogs: Legion the company seems like it wants to give gamers a taste of what the sequel will have to offer.

So if you've always wanted to play out the role of a highly-skilled action movie hacker, now's your chance to crack into the mainframe.