I downloaded that as a free PS game but haven't tried it yet. It sounds like you'd recommend giving it a miss?
I noticed they had it as a monthly game on PS Plus, after having had it at least 50% off before hand.
I'm so torn. The original (Evolved), which this one (Ascended) is just a remake of, is honestly one of my favorite games of all time, despite it being buggy as shit.
But after the studio released the final DLC for Evolved, they realized they had no way to generate revenue while they continued to work on Ark 2, which was supposed to have Vin Diesel as a character and all this other lofty bullshit. So they opted to come out with Ascended as "early access" to get around how buggy and poor performance it was. But rather than actually work on fixing it to make the game solidly playable, they just keep releasing more DLC and have shifted towards addon/micro-transactions as a way to try to milk more cash from the player base. Plus the whole $14 mil loan from the company that hosted all their servers means that company now has a monopoly on hosting, and unless you're running your own dedicate box.
I think it's also in a place where the single-player mode runs like ass, almost intentionally in a way to force people to play on a server (driving money to Nitrado.) Ascended does have cross-platform play, which is a nice difference to Evolved, because I could play on my PC while the wife played on the PS5 and we didn't have to do split-screen, but... I don't really feel like playing $2/day for a server just to play with her and I.
EDIT: Oh, I believe they also shut down all of the original Evolved servers to
force people to purchase Ascended and further milk cash from them.
When I decided to give it another try and rented a server for a while, I was legit going to try to pitch to GWF and get people playing to build up a tribe, but after realizing the performance problems and how seemingly predatory the studio's practices were, I couldn't bring myself to try to rope people into it.
It's devastating, because it's the best survival/builder/tamer I've played so far.
Honestly though, it's kind of what Palworld based itself off of (aside from Pokemon), so... Maybe I should just give Palworld a try. Not gonna scratch that dinosaur itch, but maybe it'll give the survival/base building I'm looking for.