Can a mod fix this infamously terrible Gearbox shooter?
Aliens: Colonial Marines is one of the most infamous misfires of gaming history, a disaster of a scale that’s relatively rare in the upper echelons of game development. Virtually everyone who played it at the time acknowledged that it was a buggy, broken, unfinished mess, and there were rumblings that Gearbox outsourced large portions of the game’s development while it focused on building Borderlands 2.
There’s been little inclination to reappraise Colonial Marines since, and I’m not really interested in this either. The base game is simply too compromised to attempt some contrived reinterpretation of it as some misunderstood classic. That said, I have occasionally wondered whether Gearbox’s ill-fated shooter is wholly beyond redemption, or whether it might find absolution in the collective confession box that is the PC’s modding community.
It certainly wouldn’t be the first time this has happened. Numerous games forsaken by rushed developers or impatient publishers have found reprieve in the hands of enthusiast amateurs. The most notable example is Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines, with others including Knights of the Old Republic 2 and Gothic 3.
Like those games, Aliens: Colonial Marines has its own guardian angel—Templar GFX Modding—which spent years tinkering with Gearbox’s neglected runt through TemplarGFX’s Aliens: Colonial Marines Overhaul. The mod reworks numerous elements of Colonial Marines, with the goal of elevating it from an outright catastrophe into something at least tolerable.
Indeed, it’s worth emphasising that TemplarGFX does not claim to completely transform Colonial Marines, and the modders are unambiguous in setting out expectations for the overhaul. «ACMO is not a miracle patch that turns the game into what was promised and teased back in the day», the creators write in ACMO’s ModDB overview. «There are still many bugs and issues that remain that cannot be fixed with a hex editor.»
That said, Templar GFX states «there is a decent game to be found» under the pile of acid-burned rubble that is vanilla Colonial Marines, and that the resulting experience played with the mod installed is «much more enjoyable». Since making Colonial Marines enjoyable at all would be a heck of an achievement, it’s worth delving in to see how the game fares with the overhaul installed.
