Saints Row: The Heist & The Hazardous (DLC)

The Heist and The Hazardous is the first of three story DLC packs for the 2022 Saints Row reboot, developed by Deep Silver Volition. The setup is exactly the kind of absurd Saints Row premise that fans of the series will recognise: your customisable Boss completes a million-dollar assassination contract for in-universe movie star Chris Hardy, only to get paid in a signed headshot and promptly dumped in a river. The Saints, naturally, decide to steal everything he owns. What follows is a revenge heist set in Sunshine Springs, a Palm Springs-inspired luxury district added to Santo Ileso as a free update at the same time this DLC dropped. In terms of what you actually get: three new story missions playable solo or in two-player co-op, a new weapon, a new helicopter, wingsuit challenge events called the Kaijuice Challenge around Sunshine Springs' landmarks and waterfall, 18 new outfits and cosmetics, plus the usual array of rewards that carry over into the main campaign. The centrepiece heist mission has the Boss stealing Chris Hardy's identity using high-tech voice and face-cloning gear, which is a genuinely fun concept that the missions lean into with some decent set-pieces, including attack helicopters. The new district itself is visually attractive, and the Kaijuice wingsuit events are an effortless blast to play through. Here is where the honest conversation gets uncomfortable. The whole thing clocks in at somewhere between 30 and 45 minutes of actual play. Three missions sounds reasonable on paper, but one of them is widely regarded as filler padding, and the stealth angle is described by multiple reviewers as barely-there. The missions do not push the gameplay in new directions so much as remix what you have already done across 30-plus hours in the base game. The new district, while visually appealing, is freely accessible to all players regardless of whether they bought this DLC, so you are paying specifically for those three missions, the weapon, and the cosmetics. Who is this for? Genuinely, it is for players who liked the Saints Row 2022 reboot and simply want more of the same tone and mission structure, delivered fast. If you bounced off the base game's humour, its open-world loop, or its combat, nothing here will change that read. The co-op option is a genuine bright spot for duo play, and the new cosmetics are plentiful. But the consensus across reviewers is consistent: the runtime is too short for standalone pricing, and it sets a slightly worrying bar as a first DLC outing. The DLC is also part of the Expansion Pass, which bundles all three story packs together, so if you are going in, the pass is the more sensible route.

Alex · Scout Team

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