Top 10 UK Games Chart: Despite Mixed Reception, Anthem Debuts At No.1

Anthem's official launch day arrived on February 22, and it has shot straight to the top of the UK physical sales chart. The PS4, Xbox One, and PC game pushes last week's No.1, Far Cry: New Dawn, down to No.2.

No more new titles entered the chart this week, allowing sales monitor Chart-Track's top 10 to remain largely unchanged. FIFA 19 rises two places to No.3, as Red Dead Redemption 2 (No.4) and Metro: Exodus (No.5) round out the top five.

Despite Anthem's chart-topping debut week however, Eurogamer reports the game's physical sales total just half the number of boxed copies shifted in the debut week of BioWare's last game, Mass Effect: Andromeda. The intervening two years have seen a shift toward a greater proportion of games' sales coming digitally--and downloads are not tracked by Chart-Track--while Anthem's various digital special editions made the game available early. However, a physical sales decrease of 50% is a considerable one--and Andromeda's boxed sales themselves were half those of the previous game in the series, Mass Effect 3.

Anthem has suffered from a number of issues so far, some of which were fixed in a day one update. The issues contributed to a mixed critical reception for BioWare's game, including a 6/10 from GameSpot in our Anthem review.

"Anthem has good ideas, but it struggles significantly with the execution," wrote Kallie Plagge. "It's a co-op game that works best with no one talking; it buries genuinely interesting character moments and puts its most incomprehensible story bits at the forefront; its combat is exciting until you get to the boss fights and find your wings have been clipped. Even the simple, exhilarating act of flying is frequently interrupted by the limitations of your javelin, and you never quite shake that feeling of disappointment--of knowing, throughout the good parts of Anthem, that you'll inevitably come crashing back down."