That's the normal Early Access price. It's a good game though, I've got about 150 hours into it. Can't compare it to Rust, H1Z1, or even Dayz as I've never been interested in the survival genre before this. It's got a pretty good crafting system that improves with each patch and there's been like 25-30 patches since EA release so they're actually fixing shit constantly unlike most EA games. Dinos are fun to tame/ride/use, even if the AI is fairly lackluster at the moment.
Downsides are that there's only one type of PVP server now, and there's no point at all in playing PVE (because there players can't mess with your shit unless you leave it unlocked, and dinos aren't a serious threat, so there's literally no reason to build anything but the basics). On PVP servers, it depends entirely on who else is on the server. Some are mostly friendly, some have multiple tribes of bored children and Chinese who have no purpose in life besides wrecking everything they see. Buildings are like tissue paper until you have metal which is fairly defensible, if a bit grindy to construct. Dinos are the problem. Even really low level griefers can easily kill a t-rex you spent 3-4 hours taming in a matter of minutes. If you get on a good server it's much less of an issue of course. Also, I don't recommend playing it alone. I played with a large group on the first server I was on, and it made a huge difference in getting things accomplished without feeling like a horrific grind.
Currently there is also a dupe bug and another bug that people use to walk through walls. The devs are deciding (hopefully today) on whether or not they are severe enough issues that a wipe is required.
Edit: Forgot to mention the other issue with the game currently: a 970 is good for low settings at best right now. They're using UE4 which should be easy to optimize, but at the moment getting even 30 fps out of it requires some pretty hefty sacrifices. I have a bit older AMD card--that ran Witcher 3 at a mix of high and ultra at 40-50 fps--and I get 15 fps around large bases/lots of dinos and 25 fps out in the wild.
