Christian Bale has revealed that he would only return to play Batman if Christopher Nolan asked him to reprise the role.

The actor may have hung up his cape and cowl when the Dark Knight trilogy wrapped, but he hasn't completely closed the door on the idea of suiting up as Batman again. During an interview with ComicBook.com, Bale admitted that he would consider returning to play the Caped Crusader on one condition: Christopher Nolan must be in the director's chair.

Despite his willingness to reteam with the Dark Knight trilogy director, Bale confirmed that Nolan nor anyone else had ever approached him about reprising his DC role. "Nobody, nobody reaches out to me or they keep me like a mushroom, keep me in the dark and feed me s***," Bale told the outlet.

"For me, that would be a matter of Chris Nolan, if he ever decided to do it again and if he chose to come my way again, then yeah, I would consider it because that was always our pact between each other is we would just stick to it," he then added. "We said we would only ever make three. And then I said to myself, and I'd only ever make it with Chris."

Bale portrayed Bruce Wayne/Batman in Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and The Dark Knight Rises, which capped off the trilogy in 2012. Warner Bros. later pitched a fourth Batman movie to Bale, but he decided to turn it down out of respect for Nolan who had always envisioned his story as a three-film series and nothing more.

Bale is, however, pressing forward with comic book movies as he will soon be making his MCU debut as Gorr the God Butcher in Thor: Love and Thunder, which opens in theaters on July 8. Actor Chris Hemsworth has already gushed over Bale's performance in the movie, and director Taika Waititi has claimed that he's probably the MCU's best villain yet.

Adele Ankers-Range is a freelance writer for IGN. Follow her on Twitter.

Tencent Games has announced Code: To Jin Yong, an open-world martial arts game set in ancient China.

Code: To Jin Yong is being developed in Unreal Engine 5 by Lightspeed Studios (PUBG Mobile and Apex Legends Mobile), the first AAA game from the studio. It will be based on the novels of legendary Chinese writer Jin Yong.

A two-minute trailer was released during Tencent's 2022 game conference (below) which shows off a fast-paced and frantic sword fight between two characters.

The combat will also feature magic of some sort, with what appears to be the protagonist wielding wind and his opponent (literally) throwing hands.

Tencent promised that Code: To Jin Yong will be a tribute to the late author, bringing to life his wuxia (martial art fiction set in ancient China) novels that are incredibly popular and have already spawned a myriad of film, TV, and game adaptations.

This will be the first modern game set in Jin Yong's universe, however, and seemingly the first to be targeted at an English-speaking audience. No indication of a release window was given by Tencent, though the trailer makes clear that this footage isn't final, and the game's platforms are also currently unclear.

The Shenzhen, China-based publisher has been pushing further and further into the games industry in recent years, acquiring developers including Riot Games and Turtle Rock Studios.

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelancer who occasionally remembers to tweet @thelastdinsdale. He'll talk about The Witcher all day.

Ever since Outriders released early last year, I’ve held a theory that it's the ultimate fast food game: a bland story filled with cheesy one-liners and mindless encounters that you know aren’t good for you, but undeniably awesome combat that’s easy for you and your friends to lose hours in just makes it so dang tasty. In that context, if the base game was a Big Mac, then the latest expansion, Worldslayer, is that one sandwich from KFC where the bread is replaced by fried chicken. With a fine-tuned combat sandbox, expanded build-crafting options, and a drastically upgraded endgame, Worldslayer improves upon a lot of what was already great about the original, but it also doubles down on many of its shortcomings. That includes another weak story, annoying boss fights, and an overall lack of stuff to do. The result is a fleeting evolution of its space–magic mayhem, but one that’s still entertaining enough to leave me feeling good about making a return trip to Enoch.

Like the vanilla campaign, Worldslayer’s borderline incoherent story takes place on an alien world where you play as a magical soldier called an Outrider, complete with a stupid sci-fi haircut and some of the cringiest dialogue in all the cosmos. The same mysterious anomaly that gave your character powers now threatens to destroy the entire planet, plus there’s a new scary lady that wants to kill everyone, and yadda yadda yadda – now you’ve gotta murder thousands of people and animals in the name of all that’s good.

It isn’t exactly high art, and the morbid curiosity that kept me following along meant I frequently found myself to be the one holdout in my group who didn’t vote to skip most cutscenes. That said, the story does actually answer some key questions I had after the main game and, crucially, addresses the ECA/Insurgency civil war that was left unresolved in the base campaign. It’s just unfortunate that a sci-fi world with this much potential is bogged down by bad dialogue and vague cutscenes that feel like they’re rushing through the beats to minimize the amount of time spent not killing things.

After roughly seven short hours that’s mostly mindlessly killing waves upon waves of enemies, you’ll wrap up the core Worldslayer campaign in a pretty disappointing fashion. Having defeated enemies you hardly had a chance to meet, made new allies that speak mostly in cryptic riddles, and saved bland characters from an early death, you’ll walk off into whatever the Enoch equivalent of a sunset is to advance towards the equally indecipherable endgame story.

But while the plot falls comically short of pushing you toward the action, the satisfying-as-heck combat picks up the slack in a big way. Whether you’re pulling off insane DPS as the ninja-like Trickster or Hulk-smashing groups of enemies as the unstoppable Devastator, turning whole groups of enemies into bright red giblets hits all the right notes. Automatic shotguns tear through and dismember people at short range, submachine guns apply nonstop pressure on waves of enemies, sniper rifles allow you to cover your friends from afar, and running and gunning with a crew just feels so darn good – not to mention all the wonderfully over-the-top space magic you can use.

While all of that was true with the base Outriders package, Worldslayer significantly improves the sandbox with more weapons and armor, and importantly, Apocalypse items that grant an additional mod slot which opens up a whole bunch of new possibilities. Now you’ve got a potential for 50% more ways to grab new perks that synergize with your build on every slot of your inventory, and that allows for some insane stunts. In my Trickster build, I managed to equip a full set of mods that made me a nightmare against large groups of enemies, where damaging one poor soul meant damaging everyone in the vicinity. In another build, I made all my equipment either apply freeze or increase damage against frozen enemies, which left the baddies hilariously helpless against me.

The one major exception to the otherwise excellent combat is that, as was true with the base game, fighting bosses is usually not a good time at all. Where Outriders generally makes you feel like a complete badass, boss fights pit you against an enemy with a health bar a mile long that you’ve gotta shoot at for several centuries before they finally die. Meanwhile you’re spinning your wheels spamming abilities and killing adds while you wait for the bad guy to eventually drop dead. It just goes on for so long and makes you feel like a complete wimp in the process – plus it’s got that classic game problem where the boss only has a few voice lines they repeatedly scream at you the whole time, and that gets old really fast.

On top of the new weapon and armor options are some endgame progression systems like Pax Points, which are used in an advanced skill tree that lets you pick five new, uber-powerful perks, and Ascension Points, a slow-burning progression system that reminds me of Diablo 3’s Paragon system and allows you to make small, incremental improvements the longer you play. These systems not only give you plenty of reasons to continue beyond the first campaign playthrough, but also offer some serious game-changer abilities. For example, one standout power caused critical hits with weapons to make my Anomaly powers more deadly, while using Anomaly powers made my weapons do significantly more damage. Working my build around these abilities made my character feel more powerful than I’ve ever felt in Outriders, which is no small task.

These new progression systems give you the perfect opportunity to put them to the ultimate test in Worldslayer’s endgame, which centers around a dungeon-delving activity called The Trial of Tarya Gratar. This challenging activity is a dungeon in three acts, with an aforementioned bullet sponge of a boss to fight at the end of each act and some smaller battles along the way. There are also branching paths that give you multiple ways to get through it and even offer some optional encounters that can be tackled to target-farm certain pieces of equipment – a godsend for those really looking to grind this endgame.

The actual content in The Trial isn’t terribly different from what you get during the regular Worldslayer campaign, with waves of enemies to defeat and loot to claim along the way, although it’s much more difficult than everything else and can be scaled to your level to be near-limitlessly daunting. If you were hoping for a procedurally-generated dungeon that’s different each time you enter though, you’ll be sad to learn that The Trial is essentially the same every run, with only your chosen path leading you to different encounters. That’s a bit disappointing in terms of replayability, but the good news is the encounters baked into it are some of the best in Outriders so far.

My favorite encounter is the second boss fight, which features a floating monster that isn’t a complete bullet sponge and instead requires you to deactivate his invulnerability shield before he can be damaged. Taking on waves of adds while quickly performing a ritual to make the boss damageable before he begins casting deadly spells is an absolute thrill, and it made me annoyed that every other boss fight just amounted to staying alive for a very long time while you slowly whittle down their health. Hopefully they’ll do more boss fights like that one in the future, because it makes all the others look downright awful by comparison.

Another interesting part of the post-campaign content is that it continues the (still bad) story, which was an unexpected but welcome surprise since plenty of similar games don’t even bother trying to tie a story into the endgame – including the base Outriders campaign. Unfortunately, without going into spoilers, the main issue with all this new story content is that your character has almost no role in it. You aren’t really the protagonist, and as a result you feel like a bystander in a story that’s happening around you, or in many cases you’re getting history lessons on stuff that’s already happened that has little to no impact on what you’re doing moment-to-moment. This all culminates in the expansion’s anticlimactic final plot points during the endgame, where the twists seem to have very little bearing on anything. It’s great that they’re trying to weave the story into the grind – I just wish that story was better than what we got.

If you’ve played Dungeon of the Endless, then you’ll know the biggest hallmark of the tactical tower defense game is its incredibly high level of difficulty. Defending against countless waves of enemies as a squishy hero while managing scant resources to use for tower defense was often a humbling experience. With successor Endless Dungeon being a roguelite, you might wonder if developer Amplitude intends to use a lighter touch going forward. After several hours of getting absolutely dabbed on by various bugs and robots in Endless Dungeon’s harrowing space station, I can safely report that no quarter is being granted – and that’s great news for gluttons for punishment like myself.

A lot has changed since 2014’s Dungeon of the Endless, but the core formula is still immediately recognizable in Endless Dungeon. I took on the role of two heroes stranded on a space station, searching for an exit with the help of a mechanical spider who I had to protect at all costs. Managing resources, obtaining new gear, and building defensive towers all became essential skills to surviving the brutal and relentless waves of enemies that easily overwhelmed me despite my not-insignificant tower defense chops.

Even with my characters’ extremely useful abilities, like Bunker’s skill of becoming invulnerable for an extended period of time, I quickly learned that a fast trigger finger would never be enough to prevent my untimely death on its own. Instead, I had to proceed with extreme caution as I explored the derelict space station and made my ultimately futile attempts at reaching the exit. Each new room I entered brought with it the anxiety and excitement of hoping I’d find some useful resources, while bracing myself for the inevitable monster’s den I was probably walking into. Suffice it to say, I didn’t have a single successful run in my limited time with this harrowing dungeon-crawler, and I consider that a testament to its bonafides as a hardcore roguelite – it just wouldn’t feel right if they made it easy for me.

But just because Endless Dungeon calls itself a roguelite versus the roguelikes of the past doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy. It’s true that the final version will feature a meta progression system that presumably makes the going a bit easier with each consecutive playthrough, but Amplitude describes that progression as horizontal unlockables versus vertical ones that make the player more powerful. For example, you might unlock new characters that give you more options to tackle the dungeon and its enemies, but you won’t be able to make your existing characters much more powerful than they are initially.

There are exceptions to this rule, like weapons that can be improved to give you an edge or mod slots that can give characters certain permanent boosts, but for the most part if you want any hope in surviving Endless Dungeon’s brutal waves of relentless enemies, your skill will need to improve – grinding your way to unrivaled power is not on the menu. With this model, Endless Dungeon straddles the line between being somewhat more approachable than a fully Darwinian roguelike, without putting the same kid gloves on that’s common with roguelites.

That said, the version I played had no progression system whatsoever, so I ended up just getting repeatedly eviscerated by hordes of enemies until I learned to carefully put my resources to their best use and got a tiny bit further with each attempt. It’s certainly not for the faint of heart and although I got my butt kicked every step of the way, it was an experience that left me wanting more. I look forward to getting humiliated again when Endless Dungeon comes to Early Access later this year.

Ninja Warrior's signature obstacle course is being tested for possible inclusion in the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic Games.

According to Deadline, Olympic athletes may soon be facing a new kind of challenge, as obstacle sports are being considered for the Modern Pentathlon. The tournament currently consists of five disciplines: fencing, swimming, laser pistol shooting, running, and equestrian show jumping, but organizers are looking to potentially replace the riding discipline.

Format owner Tokyo Broadcasting System Television (TBS) is said to be collaborating with several partners to trial the "ninja competition" that was made popular by Sasuke aka Ninja Warrior. The first test competition will be held in Ankara, Turkey on June 27, with another scheduled to take place the day after, following the 2022 Pentathlon World Cup Final.

"Sasuke/Ninja Warrior, which continues to win fans around the world, represents the culmination of TBS's long history of content development," said Miho Takashima, who manages the format globally. "We look forward to working with the UIPM [Union Internationale de Pentathlon Moderne] and FISO [Fédération Internationale de Sports d’Obstacles] to further expand the possibilities of obstacle racing."

Ninja Warrior started off as a Japanese sports entertainment reality TV show called Sasuke in 1997, which saw 100 competitors participating in a four-stage obstacle course. The series then expanded globally, spawning local versions in at least 18 other countries, including the United States, which adopted the format for the launch of American Ninja Warrior in 2009.

A sports video game based on the series, titled American Ninja Warrior Challenge, was released in 2009 for PS4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. The people that accepted the challenge and picked up the game had to compete across a series of daunting obstacle courses from the hit show to achieve Total Victory and earn American Ninja Warrior status.

Adele Ankers-Range is a freelance writer for IGN. Follow her on Twitter.

Thumbnail image credit: TBS.