The bold and futile attempt to fix the disastrous Aliens: Colonial Marines

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.

Chiefly, the changes ACMO makes are mechanical, rather than visual or structural. While the mod does make some minor graphical tweaks, its primary adjustments are a complete rebalance of all difficulty levels, a weapon rework to make the game's arsenal more fun and tactically satisfying, and most crucially of all, an overhaul of ACM's terrible alien AI, which was the fatal blow to the vanilla game's aspirations above anything else.

In play, it takes a beat before any of these deeper changes reveal themselves. But there are a couple of noticeable improvements before any xenos appear on screen. For starters, the mod lowers the position of the player's weapon toward the bottom-right corner of the picture, freeing up considerable screen-space so that your vision isn't half obscured by your own gun. It also substantially increases the contrast between your flashlight and darkened areas, making it feel more like it's punching through the darkness and less like you've accidentally nudged a dimmer switch with your elbow.

For the most part though, Colonial Marines' environments and general atmosphere remain unchanged, which is fine. Some dodgy character models aside, visually it holds up well enough for a game released at the tail end of the Xbox 360 era. Far more of an issue was Colonial Marines' pacing, which sadly (if inevitably) the overhaul does little to address.

Your character still moves through environments as if his squadmates are physically restraining him, while Colonial Marines still constantly interrupts its own flow for first-person cutscenes, static dialogue sequences, and your companions taking pissing ages to open every other door. Fixing this stuff would require a much deeper rework than the overhaul offers, but it's nonetheless a harsh reminder that Colonial Marines' problems are not just mechanical, but structural and the consequence of poor game design.

The overhaul doesn't really show its most significant changes until the xenomorphs appear and combat begins in earnest. As a straightforward shooter, ACM is definitely improved by the overhaul. Alongside the better-defined roles for weapons provided by the rebalancing, the mod also ups the visual responsiveness of combat. Improved acid splashes, blood spatter, and bullet effects all help make combat more visually exciting. One of the smartest touches is how broken armour chestplates and backplates visibly drop from your character's body, acting as both a dramatic visual flourish and a clear indicator of when you're exposed to health damage.

In short, blasting xenos is way more satisfying than it used to be. Sadly, the AI rework is nowhere near as successful, but there are some clear improvements. The aliens seem more aggressive, are certainly more adept at climbing on walls and ceilings, and will attack you once in range more often than not. They're even capable of occasionally getting the drop on you. While fighting through Hadley's Hope in mission 4, I died numerous times due to aliens springing from the sides or dropping from the ceiling behind me.

The problem is these successful attacks still feel largely random, rather than the machinations of a coordinated hivemind. Xenos will run toward you on a wall and then abruptly turn back the way they came. They'll spring from wall to floor and back again in clumsy, overly-elaborate animations that make them ridiculously easy to shoot. They'll aimlessly crisscross the floor in front of you and climb over and under gantries. It's like fighting a group of cats that are constantly being distracted by a laser pointer.

Compounding the problem are those lingering AI glitches. Even if a xenomorph manages to wend its way toward you, there's every chance it'll stop dead in front of you and stand there as if waiting for a hug. They'll also converge on exactly the same positions, resulting in some wild glitches like overlapping xenos suddenly vanishing from existence.

TemplarGFX openly admits that the AI "can still get stuck, and sometimes they still bug out and just stand". But I would say these issues occur far more often than "sometimes". While the combat is technically more challenging and provides superior audiovisual feedback, it still fundamentally lacks intent, and as such fighting the aliens rarely feels satisfying.

None of this, I should stress, can be laid at the feet of TemplarGFX. Fixing Aliens: Colonial Marines was always going to be a colossal task, and I respect the modders' attempts to polish Gearbox's steaming, corrosive turd. Nonetheless, I must respectfully disagree with the claim that there is a decent game hidden beneath Colonial Marines. ACMO may be better than the base game, but it is still deeply unpleasant to play, and truly redeeming Colonial Marines would require a level of effort better spent making something new.