TR3 is all over the place. It starts with a trap slide, then you get the temple which is virtually on par with TR1 and 2's longest and hardest levels. Then a couple of short intermission levels, and from there it swings from high to low without rhyme or reason. The game loves throwing you a curveball, like in that jungle level with the piranhas in the river or the wall to blow. It's so wildly inconsistent with its design and difficulty. TR1 was a nice crescendo of complexity and difficulty, and TR2 was a bitch from the start, but they were consistent. TR3 is clearly a patchwork of ideas that don't share a common blueprint. When they got it right, it's brilliant. When they just didn't have a solid idea behind a level, they went all out with the deathtraps.
The game's main problem, though, is that you can't see shit. The remake puts a partial patch to the original's lighting, but it's still hit and miss. Sure, some ridiculously dark parts like the underwater section in Lud's Gate, which must have been an absolute nightmare in the original, are now way more readable. But there's so many levers and switches and interactive monitors that are too hard to spot in both versions, as if the levels weren't already complicated enough. The lower section in the mines with the giant mutants is batshit crazy whatever version you're playing. Utterly impossible to understand what's going on there unless you light a flare, but then of course you have to fight against these hulking brutes in tight tunnels. Brilliant, just brilliant.
I salute those who managed to beat the game on PlayStation. The infinite saves of the PC and modern versions make TR3 bearable in spite of some insane parts. But I can't imagine doing it on console, with limited saves and those loading times. I remember barely beating TR2 on console, but using the level skip cheat in some of the later levels. I don't really regret being so burned by TR2 that I abandoned the series completely until Anniversary.