The models look good, and the game looks good so far.
I hope you will give the models some cartoonish look.
you can just use plain colors for some models, simple textures, and you can even add baked ambient occlusion to the textures. this is not too hard, but I don't know if an old 3ds max supports this.
for some graphical styles this might already be enough.

A small update. I would rather post a video here, but I cannot upload it on youtube or vimeo (don't know why, tested all accepted formats, only 2 minutes long and 31 mb). So here are some screenshots, which show the basic improvements:
Added basic colors to the player, it's not a final texture. The character has walking and standing animations (though I don'l like the walking anim, so it's gonna be changed), the player sits in the plane:





There is a catapult, so the player can "jump out from the plane", and the parachute script, though it shows only movement, no parachute or animations yet:

To do list:
- the animations for walking , falling, parachute
- parachute itself
- the "caboom" effect, well..... the explosion when the plane falls on the ground
- texturing......

I like it so far..
The graphic style looks like Battlefield Heroes

it looks great
i like the idea of being able to jump from the plane
and being able to walk around

i like the style a lot. good luck!

parachute added, a lot of code was rewritten for some purposes....thus not that much progress....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CppWYfXT2U
the parachute looks a bit awkward, because the arc is a bit exaggerated...still trying to find the better view...

looks good, just work on the transitions between modes

Clean and beautifull

Like Mario Galaxy, some simple but very effective textures and good models.

emm..well, these are far from being the textures that I want I just colored the guy in flat colors...

Ok i thought it was painted simple textures.
But the overall simple colors and all objects looks already great together.