JinCA no.
First of all, you can't possibly put stock into what the GI guys said considering they struck a deal with Sony to feature Days Gone in this month's issue/website. Now isn't the time for them to speak critically about their experience.
Secondly, the "bland mission design" is particularly damning for two reasons. One, it shows that the people designing the missions suck. And two, the missions are most likely set in stone at this point. You don't drastically change mission structure this late into development.
This thing has stink all over it.
Negative previews are damning man. This game will be lucky to score in the upper 70s on metacritic. Just watch.
While there is no guarantee that the issues that this one person has with the game will be addressed it's also silly to take what he says as "damning" nearly a year before release. If they have hands on impressions in February next year that say the same thing then yeah there could be a problem but I'm willing to bet that just about any open world game is going to seem like a mess when it's still this far from release.