Saints Row: A Song of Ice & Dust

I came into A Song of Ice and Dust already knowing the Saints Row 2022 reboot was a polarising, rough-edged ride that never quite found its footing. What I did not expect from its third and final DLC was to walk away genuinely entertained. The LARPing strand running through the base game was, by most accounts, the most purely fun thing Volition put in there: silly medieval dialogue, theatrical kill animations, and a bickering frenemy dynamic between your character and Gwendolyn Firebird that actually had some comedic spark. This DLC takes that specific thread and cranks it up, transplanting the action to the crumbling Vallejo district and building a whole Game of Thrones-riffing storyline around it. The opening mission, which lifts from the Red Wedding playbook, sets the tone fast: dumb, self-aware, and committed to its own bit. The content package is specific and fairly modest. Five new campaign missions, a new enemy faction in the Frostlanders, a Frostlander Axe, a Frostlander SMG, the Galitrax helicopter, a Frost Chariot golf cart, four new LARP skills, and over twenty cosmetics. The standout addition is the Banhammer, unlocked during the penultimate mission. It is the kind of gloriously stupid weapon that the Saints Row series used to lean into regularly, and it carries the climactic area-defense finale where you hold three zones of the Dustfaire against the Chill Queen's forces. That final mission has enough chaos on-screen to feel like a proper send-off. The ceiling, though, is real. You can clear the whole thing in under two hours on a relaxed pace. The Vallejo district is a new zone on paper but feels visually recycled, and the five missions do not introduce any new mechanics that the base game was not already doing. If you bounced hard off the 2022 reboot, nothing here is going to pull you back. The humor is still hit-or-miss, the structural formula is unchanged, and the shadow of a troubled development hangs over all of it given Volition's post-launch difficulties. The honest read on this DLC is that it is the best of three expansion drops for the reboot, which is faint praise when the competition included a thirty-minute first outing and a combat-trial-focused second one that reviewers found repetitive and dull. Against that bar, A Song of Ice and Dust looks pretty good. Against the standard of what a quality story expansion should deliver, it is a short but genuinely cheerful note to close on. Worth it for players who loved the Dustmoot quests and want a final round with that cast. Everyone else should check whether the base game is even on their radar before spending anything here.

Alex · Scout Team

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