Muzzle flash looks odd to me. The color is right but the shape is too... balloonie. Perhaps you could have different flash shapes for each weapon? Looks too translucent too for fire. I would expect it to be more transparent at the edges. Some examples of what I'm talking about...

Hmmmm yea true I've been meaning to fix that, I do the muzzle flashes with ~200 particles, I think I need to make them smaller in size. They start at a point and an initial velocity within a cone + random offset + random velocity adjustments [defined per weapon type], I suppose it is lost because of the size of the particles...I'll get it working again, thanks for the ref images too!

I'm just worried they look too white, I dev on a $2000 30" monitor, on my smaller 22" samsungs which run about $300 the flashes look white...maybe it's just the color settings on this computer...it looks 10X better on my dev machine [ maybe it's a XP/Vista color difference??].

I may be wrong about this, but when you moved the character under the bridge it didn't look like the shadow was cast onto him. Am I wrong? When looking at his back after he went under the bridge, it looked as though light was hitting him when it should not have been.

He is shadowed, be becomes about 75% shadowed....if I remove all lighting from the character ie: cancel out the normal mapping, etc...which is how it's supposed to be done the characters look extremly bland since only the color texture would contribute to the final color.

To avoid this, I take the absolute value of NdotL for the character+normal map, and just dampen the color of the character if they are shadowed. This looks a lot better imo since a majority of the time the player will be shadowed by a building or a bridge, etc...especially at lower sun positions. The screens were taken @ 11:30AM lighting.