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I'm always at a lose of how to start and finish a post so let's just get straight to the middle.

Silent Hill 3 places you in control of Heather Mason, the adopted daughter of the the first game's protagonist. After the events of the SH1 Harry and Heather have done into hiding from the Order and what do you know, SH3 starts off with the Order finding where you are.

The early game consists of Heather trying to get home and escape the madness. When you finally do succeed the victory is short lived as you discover that Harry has been killed and where you thought would be sanctuary quite clearly isn't. The rest of the game has Heather on the offensive (sort of) as you track down Claudia, the current head of the Order, for revenge and to discover more about her own past. Oh and she is pregnant with God.

It was at this point that nostalgia made me go play some SH3, which quickly made me lose my patience and then my interest. That's why there is a 24 hour break between the above paragraphs and the below ones.....not that you'd have anyway of knowing that.

Back to the 'review'. Gameplay in SH3 is similar to 1 and 2, as well as the early Resident Evil games: motherfucking broken.

Heather handles awkwardly with two different control schemes. You can use 2-D mode where the directions match the camera which is great until the camera changes its position and you run straight off a pit. Alternatively you can use 3-D mode where up is forward and left and right steer Heather. This avoids the aforementioned camera confusion and makes sidestepping enemies easier but makes up for it by being sluggish and unintuitive.
It's not just movement that is bad; the combat is just as awful. Melee attacks and evasion are fairly poor but the shooting takes the cake and then promptly drops it. You can't aim to save your life which is a shame as that's what you are trying to do. The best you can hope for is that enemies come directly at you and let auto aim do the rest. While playing yesterday this became abundantly clear: I was using the unlockable infinite ammo submachine gun and was still having difficultly hitting my targets.
Now it can be claimed that this is a story justification because, as Yahtzee says, the first four playable characters are "a writer, a clerk, a teenage girl, and a twat." Also, one of the main ideas with survival horror is that combat is often undesirable and unwise. It's just that these things should be displayed by making the enemies tougher or something, not by forcing the player to be in control of an invalid.

The camera deserves more criticism than it has already received. As well as the camera-control interaction it also screws with the player in the traditional way: by just not being where you ever want it to be. It can move on its own or with your input so there's not many of the Resident Evil artistic-and-atmospheric-but-ultimately-unhelpful camera angles. But that doesn't stop it from causing you grief. The most frequent problem for was that I would enter a room, have the camera be facing right at me, and here the telltale sounds of monsters. I'd then have to guess as to whether I had enough time to walk forward and get the camera back behind me, or if I should just enter combat stance and start swinging away.

AS I've already said SH3 is survival horror, which in layman's terms means that the game consists of difficult combat and lots of item hunting. Now I like the idea of a game where you do not want to just massacre every critter that crosses your path, where you have to evaluate whether each enemy is worth the health and ammo loss required to defeat it.
SH3 (and I assume others games in the series too) make this idea as unappealing as possible for me. Some of this ire is due to the controls and some is no doubt due to my own bad playing but that still leaves some blame squarely for the game's design.
A lot of my problems with the design comes from the areas' layout. There are red herring rooms with only a monster or two inside; you've got no reason to enter but you won't know that until you already have. Connecting hallways also often have enemies that you can just avoid as you pass through but between the camera, the controls and the lack of space you will cop a blow. Then you find an item and realise that you have to back track through the entire area again, which makes not killing some of the monsters kind of annoying. And while it is technically possible to sneak past enemies with your flashlight off, you can't see anything because like all horror in existence, IT'S TOO FUCKING DARK TO SEE ANYTHING.

Much of my griping about this design comes from my dislike towards games whose difficultly stems from lack of knowledge, and which therefore becomes noticeably easier on later playthroughs. I've touched on this before and I know that this issue isn't completely avoidable in game design. Nevertheless it still annoys me.
When much of the game's difficultly depends on the player not knowing what to do it seems like the wrong kind of challenge. Sure you can just memorise the most profitable course of action but it is not like you yourself have gotten any better. Just like games reliant of luck-based challenges, this sort of design robs the player of a sense of victory.

At this point of kind of blown my load as for as criticism goes, and I've still got stuff to talk about; design, plot, characters, themes, minor stuff really.
So in true Tangential Thinking style: to be continued.