After playing this for quite a bit, I've come to the conclusion that overall, the game does not look as good as Demon's or Dark Souls. Most textures are flat and boring, geometry seems a lot more simple, the backgrounds have incredibly noticeable and ugly 2D pictures noticeable from the very start of the game, and certain places that obviously were meant to be darkened are lit grey, showing flaws that were probably meant to be hidden.
What I mean by that last point is that if you remember back, there was a level in Demon's Souls called the Valley of Defilement, and there was a swamp area where you come out to a ledge and everything in the distance is pitch black and the only things you can see are faint torch lights. Well in one of the areas in Dark Souls 2, there is a similar places that seems like it should also be pitch black in the distance hiding ugly things like repetitive textures spread across a cave wall, but it's not, and instead I can see every single thing and it looks bad. At one point, looking a certain way, you can actually fill up your entire screen with one particular cave wall texture repeated over and over on a very simple wall. Mind you, this is from the other side of the cavern and it's probably not something you're supposed to see. It should be completely black from that far away.
I just played a good portion of Dark Souls right before I received Dark Souls 2, so I'm not just working from long term memories. I feel the switch to the new engine, making PC lead platform and downporting, and other questionable actions like allowing your character to see everything when it's pretty obvious certain elements were meant to be hidden hurts the visuals for these consoles versions. The few new things DS2 brings to the table visually doesn't seem to make up for the things I feel have actually gotten worse.
That being said, I can't put the damn game down. It's so damn fun. It just sucks that as I'm playing it and having fun, I'm constantly being reminded that I'm in a videogame and not in a expertly crafted world... a problem the previous games did not have.