Simon the Sorcerer 3D fell into the same trap that so many other game series fell for: the third dimension. At the time, it was the greatest technology bandwagon that everyone was compelled to jump aboard. Unfortunately, very few of them would survive the cliff drop at the end of the run. Nobody seemed to understand that as cool as 3D was, it was a step backwards in most cases.
Simon 3D was no exception. Going from the rich detail of the 2D environments in Simon 2 to the crude, simple textures of a 3D realm was rather shocking. The game looks terrible! And with that came the bad controls and the dumb 3D-terrain-style puzzles that every other "cool" game had. They also went with the "bigger is better" concept and force you to do a lot of running around through the huge landscapes of blandness. And, of course, finding hidden stuff was brutal unless you already knew where it was. The only thing worse than pixel-hunting in a 2D game is meticulously searching in a vast 3D game for those small objects to get and tiny holes to crawl through.
But the saddest thing about this is that if you can get past all that 3D ugliness, you'll find that Simon 3D is actually a great game! The story is good, the witty humor is still there, and the voice acting and music are top-notch. Even some of the more bizzare puzzles are well-done, the ones that follow the traditional adventure game style, of course. Just wait until you see how you use dynamite to go fishing, for example.
It's the whole aspect of horribly implemented 3D, though, that's in your face all the time, and can probably ruin it for you. For me, it's another good/bad scenario for Simon 3D. Simon the Sorcerer: good. 3D: bad.