Thanks for the comments,
The explosions are animated sprites mixed with some smoke ones, similar to the more recent AUM's explosion. I'm rather satisfied with the explosion results as it looks good and still remains a solid framerate.

I would agree the textures do come out a bit blurry, I'm probably going to use a bit higher resolution textures or maybe sharpen them up in code. I'm working to keep the game running well on mid/low end machines, so I'm still playing around with what works best.