Aside from regular turn-based battles that make up most of the game, there are also team-based domination battles that focus on territory control. You and your opponent get placed into an arena and each of you is usually given 3 characters that you take turns to move. The arena is split into territories that have point values attached to them, requiring you to capture a certain amount of territories (points) to win. To contest a territory with an opponent character on it, you still have to fight a turn-based battle, but the loser respawns at their starting point, so the goal never is to just defeat your opponent. This creates a refreshing mini-game that still uses core concepts of the game, which is not seen in many other turn-based RPGs.

Hacker's Memory strikes a nuanced balance between dark themes and over-the-top comedy. At its heaviest the story delves into identity theft and slavery, while at its lightest you have absurdist comedy with cartoonish characters in silly situations. The story's greatest strength, however, is that it constantly alternates between the light and heavy themes while throwing in some philosophical questions. As a result, you won't get drained from constant drama as easily and the jokes won't go stale as quickly, which makes the whole narrative more enjoyable as a whole.

The game's visuals are really well done overall, having very detailed environments, intricate character models, vibrant particle effects, and even beautifully animated cutscenes. This is further improved by the use a wide variety of colors, ranging from shades of brown and gray to neon green and neon purple. Fortunately, the game also retains great amounts of visual clarity, so the colorful style almost never gets into the way of gameplay, allowing Hacker's Memory to be both enjoyable to play and to look at.

The main side-goal of Hacker's Memory is collecting all of the 300+ Digimon found within the game, which quickly becomes addictive because of two reasons.

First, it's very simple – you either keep leveling/de-leveling your Digimon and transform them into other Digimon, create new Digimon, or buy some of them at a store. If you want to "catch" the Digimon found in random battles, you don't need to weaken them or actually catch them, but just encounter them enough times. This is because each encounter gives you a % of their data and once you get 100%, you can create that Digimon. To make it even better, you don't even have to level all your Digimon manually since you're given a farm where Digimon can level up automatically over time, reducing the tedium considerably.

Second, the Digimon designs look very interesting, cool and sometimes even funny. This includes fierce wolves, massive dinosaurs, robots, angels, devils, ghosts, sentient piles of poop, and many others. There's so much variety in the designs, it can be really exciting to see what new Digimon you'll get.

Because of these two reasons, the collection aspect can easily remain exciting right until you finish your collection.