Huh I am surprised perf wasnt more of a focus. Maybe the art style was intentionally keeping things hardware friendly?

The art style was your regular 'realistic' one that most AA/AAA games use, though even if it wasn't it wouldn't make much of a difference - some art styled enable you to make more out of the hardware, but they do not provide better performance automatically (if anything, if done naively a non-photorealistic art style can actually be worse).