Update 8/24/22 at 10:45 a.m. ET: An additional leak on Twitter has revealed that the Bandit can kill enemy Spartans in as little as five shots (four to break shields, one to the head), which is expected to make it competitive with both the Battle Rifle and the Commando. Our original report follows below.
What you need to know
- A new Halo Infinite gameplay leak has shown the upcoming M392 Bandit DMR-style weapon in action.
- The Bandit appears to be a semi-automatic rifle styled after the Halo: Reach DMR. It lacks a scope, but has glowing lights on the iron sights.
- According to the Halo Infinite Season 2 roadmap, new sandbox items (including, potentially, the Bandit) won't be added to the game until Halo Infinite Season 3, which starts on Nov. 8, 2022.
Halo Infinite developer 343 Industries has previously confirmed via the official Season 2 roadmap that new sandbox items won't be coming to the game until Season 3 (which starts Nov. 8, 2022), but that hasn't stopped the community from discovering what one of them is ahead of time. Fans have known about the existence of the M392 Bandit, a DMR-style rifle, for quite some time due to datamining. However, despite these leaks, it hadn't actually been seen in-game yet.
That is no longer the case, though, as YouTube user Stanlyhalo recently posted three separate clips of gameplay with the Bandit on their channel. By loading into a glitched Forge session on the Arena map Bazaar, Stanlyhalo was able to spawn in with the Bandit equipped. You can watch the first of these clips below.
Based on the gameplay, the M392 Bandit appears to be a scopeless and semi-automatic variant of the M392 DMR from Halo: Reach, complete with glowing lights on the iron sights. Since the weapon doesn't feature a scope, we expect that it will be best used at medium range, similar to the VK78 Commando. Because the Bandit has a lower fire rate, though, we anticipate that its individual rounds will do more damage than the Commando's, allowing it to fill the "mid-range burst damage weapon" niche.
Ultimately, it will be interesting to see how useful the Bandit will be in the Halo Infinite sandbox, which already features the Commando and Battle Rifle as effective precision weapons. 343 Industries may choose to tweak the way it works before the weapon is officially added to the game, and it also wouldn't surprise us to see a variant with the scope attached, too. We won't know more until the developers share more details about the Bandit officially, though.
Halo Infinite is available now on Xbox and PC. Despite some of its issues, it's one of the best Xbox shooters on the market right now for fans of arena-style FPS combat, and since the multiplayer is free-to-play, there's zero barrier to entry. The campaign is fantastic, too, as it features exhilarating gameplay and an excellent story.
