3D objects are an important type of multimedia data with many promising application possibilities. Defining the aspects that constitute the similarity among 3D objects, and designing algorithms that implement such similarity definitions is a difficult problem. Over the last few years, a strong interest in methods for feature-based 3D similarity search has arisen, and a growing number of competing algorithms for content-based retrieval of 3D objects have been proposed. We present an extensive experimental evaluation of the retrieval effectiveness and efficiency of a large part of the current state-of-the-art feature-based methods for 3D similarity search, giving a contrasting assessment of the different approaches.