Treasure Grab places you in the role of Alya Loot (get it? All your loot, are belong to us?) who has been hand-picked to be the protoge of the Silver Fox and take on the role of Master Thief. Before you get to do that you get busted and have to steal from four nobles to run them out of town for the Viscount Maleficus who wants to take control of things.

So off you go on nightly missions to avoid the guards and detection to escape with the loot and the family jewels. Then you run into the wall of the control scheme, something so bad that it will frustrate you because it will be the reason you often fail a mission.

The controls require you to drag your finger around the screen to move, something that is so sloppy that I had to put the game down on multiple occasions to keep from launching the iPhone across the room. Not only does your hand get in the way of playing but it also is difficult to control. On multiple occasions I was captured because I couldn’t properly maneuver my character out of the way in time. A lot of time was completely wasted because I had to go back to particular areas to loot them after having gone past already but not within range even though it appeared that I was.

The controls were a serious downside to the game and yet I still managed to finish it with a Master Thief status (having scored some 2 million points in 44 nights). Speaking of the score. There’s no tracking, online or otherwise. There’s no tracking of how many days it takes you to succeed and in general the game seems half-done in that respect.

Meanwhile the graphics and sound are extremely well done and complement each other and the game’s theme quite well. It’s a shame they didn’t incorporate some sort of online high scores or social features like OpenFeint and Scoreloop provide. Additionally I Could see Twitter integration being useful as well if you score a particularly high loot count.

Sure the game has a load of problems in controls and seriously lacks in score tracking but it’s still a great concept and a fun game, when you can manage the controls. This is a game that would have been absolutely fantastic as a PSP mini, XBLA or PSN title, just not on the iPhone with the touch screen.

Further Screens: