As part of Steam's Frontiers Free Weekend the Zero-G space shooter Shattered Horizon and Wild West shooter Lead and Gold are going to be free to play. Read on for details, and a few reasons why you might want to give these underplayed gems a shot.

Not only will both games be free for the weekend, but they'll also be available to buy for half price. If you like both of them, they'll also be available as a bundle which will give you both games for $12.49. The free weekend starts at 11pm today (GMT) on Steam, and will last through to 9pm on Sunday.

Futuremark's Shattered Horizon is team deathmatch set entirely in space. Your flimsy space suit and jet propulsion pack are the only things between you and the vacuum, and combat takes place around huge exploded asteroids and space stations. It can take a while to get used to the fact that you're fighting in a 360 degree environment where there's no such thing as up or down, thankfully, the latest of the game's free updates adds servers with AI bots, letting new players get some practice in before taking on human opponents.

Zero-G combat encourages some neat strategies, including the ability to activate your suit's magnetic boots to attach yourself to almost any surface, letting you hide behind stray rocks and giving you a more stable base for sniping. You can also 'go dark', minimising your suit's functions to make you less visible to enemy scanners. If you like the idea of chucking ice grenades in zero-G while using a space station's solar panels as cover, then give Shattered Horizon a go. It's worth noting, though, that Shattered Horizon requires a DirectX 10 video card to run. Here's a video of the game in action.



Lead and Gold is a light hearted third person multiplayer shooter set in the dusty townships of the Wild West. You can fight as one of four classes: the Blaster, with his double barrelled shotgun and dynamite sticks; the Deputy, a mid range specialist with a repeater Carbine and an ability to tag enemies to make them easy for team mates to find; the awesome Gunslinger with his heavy duty revolver and quickfire fanning technique; and the Trapper, who has a huge long range rifle and can lay bear traps to ensnare the enemy. Game modes vary from Demolition, in which you have to stack powder kegs by an enemy structure in order to take it out, to more standard point capture modes like Conquest. There's a definite TF2 vibe running through the character designs and it's a great chance to do some fighting on the Wild West. Trailer below.