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Life's not easy when you're a dwarf. You battle your way through five excruciating monster-infested levels, set off to collect your reward, and what happens? The gits who sent you on that impossible quest seem to have buzzed off, reward and all.

And as if that wasn't insult enough, everybody else in the Charon Arms, where you began your quest, has disappeared too, so you can't even get yourself a free mug of mead for your pains.

So begins the second great adventure of Karadoc The Dwarf, the stunted hero of Cadaver. On arriving at the tavern all you are aware of is that everybody seems to have disappeared in mysterious circumstances, and since they have your reward, you've got to find them.

The Pay-Off is smaller than Cadaver, about two-thirds the size, with only four levels of 250 rooms. The Bitmap Brothers reckon that while a good player (with a solution) should take around seven hours to play right through the first game, this one will only take about three hours to replay once solved.

Don't be put off by the smaller size of this module though, it's tougher than Cadaver, so although you don't need to have completed the latter to play this, it certainly helps.

The first level is set in the Tavern itself, and is just a small collection of rooms which set the scene, but even at this early stage you have to work hard for every clue.

Next, it's on to the village itself. This shows the power of the Cadaver game system, because this level is actually laid out like a true village with streets and houses. Unlike most of the levels in this module and the original game, the Village has a far greater monster-bashing bias, which should releve those whose brains hurt.

The largest level is the Temple - and whereas the first two use completely new graphic sets, this and the concluding level in the caves are re-hashes of two of the original Cadaver levels, and are both tough enough to have even the meanest Cadaver players burning the midnight oil.

You have been warned...

Cadaver began over two and a half years ago as a simple map-maker on the ST to create isometric 3D arcade/adventure games. It was named Adventure Level Editor (which sounds a lot more palatable as an acronym: ALE) and has since grown into an extremely powerful utility.

ALE makes life easy for the designer because each level is initially created as a two-dimensional map, the purpose of which is to define the size of each room (from three by three to 10 by 10 floor tiles) and show the interconnections between them.

Having created the map, the designer can then select any room which is instantly converted to a 3D shell. The room is then given its individiuality by 'painting' on previously defined background features. At this stage, objects can also be selected from a pre-defined library and placed in the room.

This is where ACL comes in. ALC is a language designed by The Bitmap Brothers' own Steve Kelly to control the events in Cadaver and its sequels. The way it deals with objects is very clever. Each object placed in a room has a unique number, and associated with that number is a few lines of ACL code that tell the program exactly how to deal with that object under different circumstances. Can it be opened? Can you insert things in it? And so on.

One of the characteristics that makes Cadaver such an absorbing game is that some objects can be opened to reveal other objects. For instance, you might open a cabinet to find a small casket and then open the casket to find a key. In this case, both the casket and the kery are kept in special Attic rooms until they're needed. These are rooms that are on the map but can't be reached by the player. When an objecft is found it automatically removes itself from an attic room and places itself as near to its container as it can.

The language is also used to control events in each room, like doors lacking and unlocking. Even the central character is not sacrosancy. ACL can be used to detect his position, and even push him about, overriding what you are doing with the joystick!

The problems with levels disks is that, on the whole, what you get are some new graphics and more or less the same gameplay, and very often that's not enough to justify a new product. Fortunately, Cadaver was the sort of game that, even if you managed to complete it, left you wanting more. So once you've purchased more in the form of The Pay-Off, what exactly do you get for your money?

True, there's the usual new graphics... but that ain't all. What makes this levels disk so worthwhile is that designing the original game seems to have been very much a learning experience for the Bitmap Brothers, with resultant improvements in almost every department becoming apparent here.

Players who have completed Cadaver will enjoy the greater variety and continued challenge, while newer players may want to sample more of the first game before tackling this tougher nut.