Gem Fighter

Gem Fighter wears its inspiration on its sleeve — two side-by-side falling-block boards, chain combos that queue an attack against the opponent, and a character select screen where Ryo, Kez, Chin-Lu and Sokara stand in for a rather more famous roster. That's a clear structural debt to Puzzle Fighter, but it isn't a hollow skin over the idea: each fighter carries a distinct attack pattern and its own damage multiplier (reading the source, Chin-Lu hits 20% harder than the others), and a real AIController class scores potential piece placements against separate weight tables for easy, normal and hard difficulty rather than just dropping pieces at random.

Touch gets almost everything right

The three actions that matter most in a falling-block game — move, rotate, speed up the fall — were all tested directly against a real touch input pipeline on a simulated phone, not assumed from the code. Dragging the on-screen stick zone moved the active piece left and right. Tapping the face button rotated it, confirmed repeatedly and from two different points inside the button zone. Dragging the stick downward and holding it there measurably accelerated the piece's descent compared to the untouched AI board next to it. All three held up identically on desktop with a keyboard.

The one action that doesn't reach touch is the hard-drop slam. It's bound to gamepad buttons 3 and 12 in the game's own key-reading code, and the two-button touch layout this build ships with can only ever produce buttons 0 and 1 — there is no touch gesture that maps to the instant-drop button at all, architecturally, regardless of where you tap. That's a real gap: a touch player loses the fastest way to lock in a placement and bank a combo. It is not, however, the kind of gap that makes the game unplayable the way a missing jump button breaks a platformer — soft-drop still lets a touch player speed a piece down, just not instantly, and every other system in the game remains fully reachable.

Real versus-puzzle depth

What's underneath the controls is more game than a lot of browser puzzle clones bother with. Clearing gems queues damage against the opponent's board on a delay, so chain-building against a ticking clock is a real tension rather than a decorative combo counter, and the character multipliers mean a fight against Chin-Lu plays differently from one against Kez even before accounting for AI difficulty. A genuine single-player VS CPU mode means this doesn't require a second person on the same keyboard to be worth opening, which matters for a phone-first review — local two-player is here too, but two people sharing one touchscreen is its own thing this review isn't set up to judge.

Verdict

Gem Fighter is an ambitious, functional versus puzzle-fighter that gets the vast majority of its touch story right: movement, rotation and drop-speed all work correctly and reliably by touch, confirmed through direct testing rather than assumption. The missing hard-drop is a real, specific limitation worth knowing about going in, but it costs convenience rather than playability. For a free, open-source browser game with this much actual system underneath it, that's a good trade.