There really is a lot of beauty in this game! The starting town with plague victims is well done. I mean, dead plague victims and human misery isn't beautiful, but you know what I mean.
And the faces vary. I do not care about lip sync at all. But characters can sometimes look horrifying. Also, I made a white male as my main character. I might restart with a female, because my first companion looks almost identical to me, and switching in the inventory screen gets confusing as to which person I'm looking at. That's just a minor nitpick though. But inventory could have been done better. It's in the "clunky" realm for some reason. There's so many better inventory solutions they could have emulated.
I almost always dislike crafting in games beyond a very simple level. I can't take the idea of a person carrying huge amounts of iron ore (for example) around very seriously. Collecting ore needs to go away in all games. And I dislike the concept of carrying 38 short swords and 27 shields and sets of leather armor back to town to sell for 2 gold pieces each. It's all very old, unrealistic and kind of tedious. But that's my personal opinion, and it happens in many games.
My take is that the main thing smaller, lower budget titles lack is an overall Art Director, UI/UX person, whatever. Seems plain that different teams and people worked on different elements of these games without an overall lead to bring it all together. That's where the budget shows. Not that it's overall weaker, but that parts don't often mesh well.
I am enjoying it so far. I've been wondering about the Colonialism angle of the game myself. Even the name "Greedfall" evokes rapacious greed of Colonial forces and the bad things that fall out from it, which has happened in our collective history many times over. I agree the Kotaku author should complete the game before "reviewing" it. But the game by its very nature and name is going head-first into the concept of colonialism and power struggles between invading forces and native peoples. I'm interested in what they do with it. I think Pillars of Eternity 2 went with that framework somewhat, but this seems to be the main focus of the stories in the game.
Now I need time to play and a way to avoid spoilers.