10 Video Game Rewards Not Worth Unlocking
6. The Auditore Cape - Assassin's Creed II
Assassin's Creed II is still one of the best games in the series, with an awesome protagonist in Ezio, a beautiful world, immensely fun stealth combat, and some - for once - decent modern-day sections.
But on the other hand, its collectibles system totally sucks.
Across the game's expansive map, there are 100 hidden eagle feathers for Ezio to gather. They're mainly stashed on rooftops, requiring you to do a lot of precision climbing in order to reach them, and it will take a good few hours to nab each one.
Exploring the world and climbing tall buildings sounds really fun on the surface, but bizarrely, the game doesn't bother offering you a way to visually track which feathers you've collected. They aren't marked on the map, and this means that you'll either have to wander around blindly or use a guide, and even with the latter method, you've no way of knowing which feathers you've already grabbed, so you'll end up spending a lot of time travelling to locations, only to find out that you've already been there.
It's a pain in the neck, and you'll like the game just a little bit less by the time you're finished. And what do you earn for your troubles? The Auditore Cape, which, to put it plainly, is bloody useless.
While the game's other, easier-to-obtain capes have nifty features like making Ezio incognito in certain regions, the Auditore Cape will instead make all enemy NPCs hunt you down on sight, meaning that you can't explore without being attacked.
It serves no purpose other than getting you into fights, which, unless you really, really love Assassin's Creed's hand-to-hand combat (which has always been inferior to its stealth combat) is a pointless function.