Three or four years ago, I would have fallen to my knees and begged for a Transformers MMO. Today I would not, which is partly because I feel totally burned out on MMOs and partly because my knees increasingly make this unpleasant clicking noise if I bend them too abruptly. But you can be damned sure I’ll at least have a big old fiddle with the character creator in Jagex’s upcoming Transformers Universe even if the long-haul of levelling and whatnot is too galling.

Get a look at the first proper in-game footage below. Spoilers: robots.

It’s surprisingly good-looking given it’s a browser game, doing a fine job of capturing the slightly spindly style of the slightly tedious Transformers Prime CGI cartoon. I’d rather build a big, blocky G1-style bot, but these look fairly characterful and at least it’s not the indistinguishable insectoids of the Michael Bay movies.

We still know vanishingly little about how the game plays, but with a 2012 release still nominally on the cards I guess we’ll find out soon. Can I play as Unicron? I’m sure that would be fair.

You can ‘sign up’ for a faction – Autobots or Deceptions, naturally – over at the Transformers Universe website, though it doesn’t seem to entail anything except newsletters as yet.

Via Gamespot.