It' s no Ninja Gaiden or Chaos Theory, but it' s certtainly nicer than many Xbox games, and i wouldn' t limit that to just first gen games either.
God of War 2, like Tekken 5 and Shadow of the Colossus - really pushes the system to it' s limits, but to be frank, PS2 maxed out is far more impressive than most of Xbox' s mid-range games. Only the best looking games on Xbox look nicer, and even then PS2 handles somethings, specifically particle effects better than Microsoft' s machine.
I mean, look at RE4. It' s one of the nicest looking games of the previous generation and the PS2 version is only lacking the fancy lighting effects and has blurred textures compared to the Gamecube version. Everything else remained intact, and it got additional content on top of the Cube version so it was hardly due to a lack of disk space.
I' m not even limiting it to multiplatform games like the Prince of Persia titles, Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks or Spartan: Total Warrior, because i think GoW2 looks nicer than both Otogi games, Advent Rising, Blinx 2 (developed by Blue Dragon dev Artoon), and even (oh my!) Jade Empire...
I don' t even thing the first game was that good and i don' t expect much from this. I prefer DMC3 and Ninja Gaiden over this, mostly because both have far far more depth as far as gameplay goes, but i wouldn' t put the game down graphically. If it ran in 720p native it' d rival many next gen games, just as Ninja Gaiden does running on a 360.