I Picked up my copy of Dishonored the day it came out, rushed home, and popped it in my xbox. My first impression? I hated how fuzzy the brush stroke artstyle looked when you viewed the environments closely. I know its a very nitpicky thing to say but that was the first impression I had when I started the game. Once I became accustomed to the artstyle and played through the intro I delved in to the meat of the game, killing dudes, or so I thought. I had never really played a game that handled stealth incapacitations as well as Dishonored has. The better I became at the mechanics the more I realized that a stealth playthrough without kills was not just feasable but it was......fun. I mean really really fun. So much so that as soon as I finished the game on the darker playthrough ( killing people causes the story to be darker) I immediately started a brand new playthrough intent on not killing anyone (so far I've killed only 1 person, I hid him on a build ing and he fell off.......my bad.) The ability to use powers like stopping time and a short range teleportation made it very easy to avoid enemies and hide the incapacitated ones.
As far as the story goes, It's about average, don't be expecting to get a Bioshock caliber story out of this game. That being said, who really goes into a semi-open world choice driven game in the style of Deus Ex for the story? The gameplay, sound design, and graphics (to a lesser extent) shine. I play a lot of games, and Im pretty sure this game will get a solid 3 playthroughs out of me, that's saying a lot considering It's not named "Borderlands 2."