When Doctor Lautrec was first unveiled to the gaming world, many wrote him off as Konami's crass attempt to copy the success of Nintendo's Professor Layton series. The good news is that Lautrec isn't just riding on the coattails of the DS' champion puzzle-solver. The bad news is that the snooty new adventurer steals from many different sources, ranging from Pokémon to Indiana Jones to Metal Gear Solid, and at no point do all these "borrowed" elements come together to produce an entertaining game.

Doctor Lautrec and the Forgotten Knights is a game with a strong narrative focus, and this story is its main redeeming feature. Jean-Pierre Lautrec himself is an adventurer (though he despises that term) in the vein of Sherlock Holmes, an insufferably egotistical genius in the art of detection. His partner, the starry-eyed ingenue Sophie Coubertin, accompanies him on his archeological adventures. Together they solve ancient riddles, outwit local law enforcement, defeat various evil-doers, and tame "Treasure Animatus" - i.e. ancient artifacts possessed by cute, collectible monsters. The series' tagline, "Forgotten Knights", refers not only to the crime syndicate of iron-masked malcontents that Lautrec must thwart during his adventure, but also the hopes that this game will inspire as many sequels as Professor Layton.

The animation in the cutscenes is beautiful, with simple lines and expressive, stylized characters. The English voice acting is impressive, as the actors are able to evoke 19th century French accents without plunging into stereotype. The story itself is not particularly novel, and players familiar with basic storytelling tropes will find all the usual cliches within the characters - the hero's blowhard rival, the obsessively antagonistic police investigator, the mysterious waif who offers the hero his mission, etc. However, the overall package is engaging enough that the story will still entertain, even if it doesn't make much effort to transcend genre expectations.

The gameplay, however, is where Doctor Lautrec falls apart. The puzzles inspired by Professor Layton are only part of the Lautrec experience, and even they aren't as varied or clever as their ideological predecessor. Players will likely get tired of doing the same crosswords and spot-the-difference puzzles. Worse yet are the other modes in Doctor Lautrec's gameplay roulette. Exploring the streets of Paris offers little more than the most inane of RPG townsfolk dialogue, while going into the dungeons underneath Paris involves infuriating stealth sequences in which Lautrec must evade the forces of both the police and the Forgotten Knights. Unlike the exploits of another Konami-published stealth hero, these scenes are less tense than just plain tedious, as they're merged with routine block-pushing puzzles that turn finding the right path without getting caught into a frustrating ordeal. The only unique part of  Doctor Lautrec and the Forgotten Knights's game design is the Treasure Animatus, where Lautrec must use collected treasure monsters to capture new creatures. Though the idea is clearly lifted from a certain series about pocket monsters, the presentation is actually novel, with players tactically placing their treasures on a circular grid surrounding the foe, with different positions having different effects. Unfortunately, in the end it boils down to simply overpowering your enemy with higher-level treasures, and most players won't even have to bother with the tactical elements.

The famous writer T.S. Eliot once said that immature poets imitate, but mature poets steal.  Doctor Lautrec and the Forgotten Knights is a fitting example of a game development studio doing the former. It draws from a number of successful sources, but it never goes deep enough into what made those games work so effectively. The result is a thoroughly mediocre experience, only slightly obscured by its impressive production values.

GameDynamo's Score for Doctor Lautrec and the Forgotten Knights (3DS)

	Score	Description
Graphics	85	The animated cutscenes are beautiful and fluid. The in-game graphics capture this style effectively, though the polygonal character models look a bit simplistic.
Sound	91	Excellent atmospheric music and superb voice acting. The audio is by no means one of Lautrec's faults.
Gameplay	38	An unsatisfying and inconsistent mish-mash of disparate game elements, none of which come together to actually be fun.
Play Value	63	There's a lot of Treasure Animatus to collect over the course of the game's long story, but doing so will be so repetitive and tedious that you won't want to bother.
Final Score	52	Doctor Lautrec and the Forgotten Knights is a poor effort from Konami, proving the dangers of designing games in response to the whims of the marketplace.

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