I'm an enjoyer of a nice B-game, and this definitely feels like a B-game; the kind that would have been built on the Unreal engine in the early 2000s and sold on a newsagent's stand. You go through five levels over the course of about an hour, fighting the titular emaciated little freaks, traveling through time between a bunch of disconnected eras, and then you shoot the big baddie at the end to win. It's a bit reminiscent of Serious Sam's early levels, when the game is still throwing a normal number of enemies at you in reasonably-scaled areas, but still has room to crack weird jokes.
There's a lot of that turn-of-the-century strangeness in the environments, which make the requisite gestures towards being believably structured while being populated by arcade-style pickups (including giant floating coins that give you points, because of course there's a weirdly vestigial scoreboard system). Some details manifest as low-poly models, but some manifest as grainy photosourced textures, marking the transitional period where they could share a room without anyone complaining about the discrepancy. There's even a 'kids mode' that turns all the blood green, in true 'half-hearted 2002 response to local news station's moral panic' fashion.
Other stuff that kinda fascinates me: the game's level design does play with verticality, but there's no jump button. I'm normally a big advocate for putting a jump button in every post-Doom FPS—even those that don't strictly need it, just for the feeling of mobility and freedom it provides—but it does kind of work here. Does it feel a bit silly to be stymied by a knee-high ledge? Sure, but it does encourage you to look at space in a slightly different way. Limitations are fun, especially when the game starts introducing bounce-pads and breaking those limitations in small, specific ways.
DUSK straddled a fine line between the modern 'idealised' boomer shooter—a bunnyhopping, circle-strafing, ultra-streamlined frag-fest—and a more honest view of old-school shooters, which was conscious of their quirks, their one-off vanity features, their dabbling in horror, the way they played with pacing and experimented with level design. Chop Goblins feels like a step even further over that line, into territory that is perhaps a little too honest—but it's still a fun little reminder of the FPS's awkward puberty.