Character Modelling Critique and Re-Model

With my Game Character Rig pretty much complete, I am still playing around with a few bits and bobs like parenting weapons to hands etc but thankfully this work can continue after the character is skinned to the rig, I have started to look critically at the main protagonist model, and soon I shall direct my attention to my low level enemy. The reason for this sudden critique is that for the last however many weeks the various rigs I have been building have been the limiting factor to how well the character would animate, ie the foot can't be moved that way etc. Well now that the rig is pretty much complete and is I think a very good rig, I realise that the character model isn't as fantastic as perhaps I thought it was when I first built it. After the first rebuild of the character there wasn't much wrong with the shape of the character as I had been working very closely with the concept art I was given, however the big issues with the character come with topology, which was much better in the second version than the first however it still leaves something to be desired. There is also the problem of where polygons are currently allocated, having done a bit of research during this model crit I discovered one of my feet has over 1000 polygons, now the converse shoes does look very nice but for how much its going to be seen in a 3rd person game and the size of the detail this is completely unnecessary so thats going to change. This is a big thing across the entire model I've noticed there is a lot of small detail with high poly counts, not surprising as details require more polygons to create, however I really should have spent more time considering the on screen size of these details and how many polygons comparitively I was spending in these areas. This critique has highlighted when you texture a model and turn off the wire frame you could have two identical models next two each other and you wouldnt realise that one has a really good topology for animation and no wasted polys where as the other has a very uneven polygon placement and would deform terribly. My task at the moment is to make my main character model the former.