Overwatch map tricks and secret routes

One of the most important skills in a shooter is map awareness—knowing all your available escape and flanking routes—and a lot of that comes from experience.

One of the most important skills in a shooter is map awareness—knowing all your available escape and flanking routes—and a lot of that comes from experience. But watching other players doesn’t hurt, either, so we’ve compiled a guide to some of our favorite routes and tricks in all of Overwatch’s maps (except for Route 66 and Hollywood, where we didn’t have many strong opinions). This guide isn’t totally comprehensive, of course—there’s tons more already discovered or waiting to be—but we’ll keep adding new routes as we test ‘em, as well as some good turret placements.

Hanamura

Widowmaker is excellent for defending on Hanamura. It’s got good choke points to work with, and lots of elevated hiding spots. One is inside the final capture point area, and is easy to get to— just grapple up to the platform. Further out from that point, you can sneakily camp on top of a hunk of technology, as seen below.

Temple of Anubis

Lots of characters, including Hanzo, Genji, D.Va, and Pharah, can get through the top windows in the ‘tall room’ on the left path as you approach the first capture point as attackers. It’s a little trickier with Junkrat, but he can do it.

Junkrat’s ultimate can be bounced through the windows, too.

There are a lot of elevated platforms near the second point, which Genji can make good use of.

Widowmaker can snipe from the floating barge near attacker spawn.

Volskaya Industries

Characters with movement abilities (D.Va, Tracer, Pharah, Reaper, and so on) can skip the bottleneck on the first point entirely by flying/teleporting over the river to the left as you approach from attacker spawn. Just be careful: Lucio can pull off a defensive ambushat the beginning.

On the final point of the map, attacking Pharahs, Lucios, D.Vas, and others can sneak around the right side of the map, to the right of the health kit closet. The main chokepoint is very defensible, so by going this way you can harass and scatter the defense to make it easier for tanks to get through.

King's Row

Pharah, Genji, and D.Va can fly under the refinery between the final capture point and the first bend in the final approach—useful for both attack and defense. Mercy should be able to do it if following.

An attacking Lucio can get to the top window of the church they spawn in by wall running (this takes a bit of trial and error). From there you can speed boost-wall run directly to the capture point without touching the ground.

Tips for six more maps on the next page...