Have Eurogamer ever been wrong about something similar? I only started following their articles last year.
I wouldn't call this game even remotely crisp. Not even on PS4 at 1080p. The cheap AA, CA, and film grain make for a very blurry and gritty IQ imo. Which I guess isn't too much of a bad thing as it suits the tone and atmosphere of the game quite well.
I know what you mean, there is a boatload of post processing being used, but even with it, it looks very sharp to me. It's no Forza Horizon 2 clean, but it's a hell of a lot better than Ryse, I would say it looks even slightly crisper than Sunset Overdrive, and that game looks pretty good for 900p.
I don't know, maybe the tech teams at Xbox had a change of work ethic. Something along the lines of: "Hey guys, we know we are going to have a hard time pushing 1080p due to hardware, how about instead we use some of that software expertise to improve our upscaler, make the resolution drop less noticeable." I mean, setting any game to 900p on PC, I can instantly notice the blur, but it's way less noticeable on consoles, at least at that 900p range, because BF4 looks like a blurry mess at 720p. Their teams have done some magic with the software backwards compatibility, so I wouldn't be surprised if they refined the upscaler too in similar fashion.