I agree it looks ugly… I don't usually pay much attention on gfx, but have you read the system requirements page?

CPU: Athlon XP or Pentium IV, 1500 mhz
RAM: 256 mb
GPU: ATI Radeon 9700 or GeForce 4 MX
HDD: ~200 mb

Mayb its because the work is still in progress, but seriously I know dozens of older games that look much better visually. And those games even run on my older pcs.