Feature: Saints Row Expansion Pass Review - Is It Worth Buying?

Is the Saints Row Expansion Pass worth buying? With the reboot's DLC plans having now come to an end, we wanted to take a look at the sandbox's additional offerings and attempt to gauge whether the aforementioned pass is worth the price of entry. With that goal in mind, we recently played through all of the Expansion Pass content, so we could evaluate the package as a whole.

You can find our thoughts below, broken down between each expansion.

Saints Row Expansion Pass: Is It Worth Buying?

To start with, let's quickly recap what the Saints Row Expansion Pass actually includes.

Priced at £24.99 / $29.99, the Expansion Pass gets you access to three separate expansions:

• The Heist and the Hazardous
• Doc Ketchum’s Murder Circus
• A Song of Ice and Dust

None of the expansions tie directly into the main story of Saints Row, so you don't have to worry about buying them just to get the full picture. The DLC is more like a series of additional adventures — although the expansions themselves have standalone narratives.

Each expansion can also be purchased separately, but as you'd expect, it's cheaper to buy the full Expansion Pass if you want them all.

Saints Row: The Heist and the Hazardous

The first expansion for Saints Row released on the 9th May, 2023. It features a new character named Chris Hardy — an in-universe movie star — who makes the mistake of crossing your Saints Boss. What follows is a short selection of missions that take place within the district of Sunshine Springs — an area of the map that was added in a free content update.

Before we go any further, we should probably put an emphasis on the word 'short'. The Heist and the Hazardous is barely an hour long in terms of length, and even then, one of the expansion's few missions feels like filler. The concept of unleashing revenge upon an unlikeable celebrity is a fun one, and there are some entertaining beats during its runtime, but there's just no getting away from how quickly it all ends.

In truth, The Heist and the Hazardous isn't a great introduction to Saints Row's DLC suite. Sunshine Springs is an attractive area, but you don't need the expansion to explore it. And while a couple of the missions hit some relative highs — attack helicopters! — there's nothing to really separate the Saints' shenanigans from what you've already been doing for 30 hours in the base game.

In a word, forgettable.

Saints Row: Doc Ketchum's Murder Circus

Saints Row's second expansion tries something a bit different, and the result is unfortunately hit and miss. Released on the 6th July, 2023, Doc Ketchum's Murder Circus essentially adds a new 'mode' to the game. Accessed through your in-game phone menu, you can take part in the Murder Circus at any time, controlling one of several premade characters in an attempt to survive a combat-focused gauntlet.

And that alone will be a kicker for some players: you don't actually play as your Boss in this DLC. It's all framed as though your custom antihero is watching these competitors live on stream, as they're forced to fight through four waves of enemies. Again, like Heist and the Hazardous, this expansion has a fun concept at its core, but when you're actually playing it, the process of repeatedly slogging through the same environment with multiple characters who aren't your own gets old pretty fast.

That's not to say combat in Saints Row is bad — it's solid in the base game — but it doesn't have nearly enough spectacle to carry an expansion that relies on replay value. To make matters worse, some enemy types just aren't fun to fight against, with tedious 'wait for the weak spot to appear' mechanics — and the DLC just loves to wheel them out in the later challenges.

If you're looking for a slice of chaos and you want to try out some daft new weapons, Doc Ketchum's Murder Circus can scratch the itch — but pushing through the challenges more than once or twice is going to be a tall order.

Saints Row: A Song of Ice and Dust

Easily the highlight of an otherwise lacking Expansion Pass, A Song of Ice and Dust is the third and final DLC for Saints Row, released on the 8th August, 2023. It brings back the Dustmoot storyline from the main campaign, in which the Boss and their friends take part in a state-wide, live action role-playing event. In order to start the DLC, you'll need to have completed the original Dustmoot missions in the base game.

Now, the previous Dustmoot stuff wasn't perfect, but it did always feel like the development team had good fun making it, and that sense of enjoyment bled through into some comedic dialogue and dumb jokes that riffed on role-playing culture. A Song of Ice and Dust builds on this, giving players a series of fairly entertaining missions that'll last you two hours or so.

This third expansion is the best realised of the bunch, both in terms of presentation and mission design. It reuses a couple of environments from the previous Dustmoot stories, but that's not enough to distract from an entertaining ride. The later missions in particular know how to party, equipping your Boss with one of the game's most satisfyingly stupid weapons.

A positive end to a questionable set of expansions, then.

Conclusion

So, is the Saints Row Expansion pass worth buying? On sale, maybe. But at full price — £24.99 / $29.99 — it's a bit of a hard sell. If we had three expansions all of the quality shown by A Song of Ice and Dust, then we'd probably be looking at an easy recommendation for fans of the base game. However, The Heist and the Hazardous, with its incredibly short runtime, and Doc Ketchum's Murder Circus, with its focus on repetitive combat trials, undoubtedly hold the bundle back.

If you really like the Saints Row reboot, there is of course some value here, but if you were never quite sold on the base game, its humour, its arguably aged gameplay, then this Expansion Pass won't do anything at all to change your mind.

Did you buy the Saints Row Expansion Pass? Have you played the DLC yourself? Give us your own verdict in the comments section below.