Jade Star posted:

On top of that, hand crafting the maps tends to mean they are very well decorated, in terms of aesthetics as well as function for gameplay. In the first area there are very nifty statues with enormous bases that act as a 2x2 square of high cover, but you can shoot the statue to have it come crashing down to crush enemies and destroy cover alike. There are braziers that fit the gothic imperium of man aesthetic everywhere and many of these can be shot at to poor fire and coals over nearby enemies. It's such an unexpected little bit of fun to utilize these things in Chaos Gate. Many of these things do different things and are interacted in different ways. By comparison X-Com really only ever had the red barrels where you shoot something that's not an enemy and it explodes. Truly, on a deep, logical, mechanical level the statues and fire bowls and pillars and columns might not be that much different from red barrels, but the visual and mechanical differences make them novel and fit into the environment of the game in a more seamless fashion. I think that's worth noticing and appreciating that and Chaos Gate does a great job with a lot of these little touches, more of which I will surely comment on again in the future.