OnePlus 12R Genshin Impact Edition review - “A team up that has a shedload of style and substance”

• A marriage of superb design and technoogy
• Garage box of desirable goodies
• Game for hours with zero downside

When I first heard that OnePlus was teaming up with miHoYo to create a Genshin Impact edition of the OnePlus 12R based on the character Keqing I was very sceptical. I wrote it off, thinking it would just be a purple phone with an insanely jacked-up price. After one week with it, though, I am pleased to report I was incredibly wrong, shockingly on both points.

Christmas all over again

My first thought when the box arrived was that OnePlus overdone it with shipping, the cardboard box was huge for a phone. I wasn’t expecting to open it and be greeted with a garage kit of Keqing goodies. You get some fantastically designed accessories like a Keqing phone case, a phone stand, an acrylic model of the girl herself, some pins, a nice display to store your phone, and a custom charging cable and plug, all featuring Keqing in a take of her Opulent Splendor outfit. It is all quite good quality and I remain quite pleased.

A triumph of design inside and out

The phone itself is a stunning Electro Violet colour with Silvery White Feature motifs etched on the back above a render of Keqings’ Lightning Stiletto logo. It really is a beautiful design, one you feel pretty sad about slapping a cover over. There is even some Electro Etching on the top that, when the light hits it right, you'll see the name Keqing projected onto whatever surface you point your phone at. Inside the phone is where the fun starts though, as the Keqing inspirations are plentiful and fantastic.

The Electro sign replaces the fingerprint scanner, and when scanning it becomes the Lightning Stiletto, which is pretty cool. This happens on top of the animation custom lock screen of the Liyue Qixings’ Yuheng. After unlocking, you are greeted with a wonderful wallpaper of the Stiletto as well as some Genshin-inspired icons and clock faces.

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Something I wasn’t expecting was all the voice lines from Keqing that got loaded in. These are taken directly from the game and have been assigned to notifications, ringtones, and alarms, so you can get woken up by her encouraging you to get out of bed, or her telling you to stop procrastinating. It's a neat touch, however, some of the lines feel like they were picked just at random. Which is kind of understandable, I can’t imagine any point in-game where she would have said pick up your phone.

Perfectly capable companion for the modern world

I spent a week using the OnePlus 12R as my main phone, from Spotify to navigation to YouTube and all the general lifestyle uses, and it held up perfectly well. Everything was responsive, the display is beautiful thanks to the 1.5K Display, and the music blasted out loud enough that I could actually hear it during showers, something I can’t do with my current phone. Sorry Samsung, you’re losing right now.

To be fair, I did have two gripes that kept popping up. During sessions of mindlessly scrolling YouTube Shorts, I did find that the video randomly kept scrolling when the current video wasn’t done, which was a bit annoying. My main problem is with the timer though. You can only have one, which is not really helpful when cooking multiple things, and for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how to change the notification sound away from Keqing saying wake up.

The smoothest gameplay mobile can offer

Now let's move on to the good stuff, the gaming capabilities. I wanted to really test this, so I put myself through the arduous testing of playing for hours. The sacrifices we make for you, dear reader. To get a snapshot of accurate numbers, I pushed the setting up to Pro Gamer mode, and played three different games for three hours; Genshin Impact, Honkai Star Rail, and Free Fire MAX.

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Throughout this, I set every game to its highest graphical setting, and when playing Genshin I had the HyperRendering turn on. I wanted to break the phone, plain and simple, and boy did I fail. The first thing that you notice is just how hard the Cryo-velocity Cooling System is working. At no point did I ever notice the phone heating up despite having everything at max, and the fan only turned on twice during Honkai Star Rail when the temperature hit 25°C. It is impressive how cool the whole thing stayed.

The beefy 16GB RAM, which you can sacrifice memory space to boost by another 12GB, coupled with the powerful Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip resulted in some of the smoothest, prettiest gameplay I have experienced on a phone. Free Fire MAX ran flawlessly during the frantic firefights and Star Rail did stutter once during one of the first battles, but then performed perfectly afterwards, despite my spamming of Dan Heng Imbibitor Lunaes’ flashy ultimate.

Of course, this being the Keqing custom OnePlus, we have to touch on Genshin Impact a bit more. I have played on a Samsung S13, a PS5 with a CrystalHD TV, and my slightly older gaming laptop, and I genuinely believe that it has never looked as good as it has on this 12R. Climbing to the top of Qingyun Peak was beautiful, both on the way and at the end, and seeing all the elemental reactions and Keqings’ shiny ultimate blasting around was stunning. Sadly, using Keqing on the Keqing-themed phone does not unlock an easter egg.

The Duracell bunny has nothing on this

Another impressive point, both in gaming and everyday life, is longevity. It packs a 5,500mAh battery that comes with some handy settings to prolong the life, such as smart charging and the ability to stop at 80%, which is really all you will need. For day-to-day tasks, I didn’t bother charging one night and had no problem making it to the next evening, and thanks to the SUPERVOOC charging you will only need half an hour to give yourself a full charge.

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The most noteworthy thing about the battery life is how much gaming you can get from it. I tracked it every hour during my three-hour window with the Hyper HDR, max graphic setting and Pro Gamer Mode. It lost 10-13% power every hour, which is a truly impressive performance. A lot of this is down to the CPU-Vita which constantly manages the CPU to reduce power load whilst maintaining quality, a smart piece of tech.

For all you shutterbugs, the 12R packs a 50MP main camera with an upgraded Sony IMX890 sensor, a 112° FOV ultra-wide camera, as well as Raw HDR. Now, do I know what any of this means? Not at all, I don’t dabble much in photography, these are just numbers and words. What I can report though is the quality of the camera is fantastic and the level of detail it can pick up is stunning to this amateur cameraman.

A lot of quality for a very reasonable price

Let’s open the wallet and address that increasingly more important part; the price. The standard Oneplus 12R costs $599.99, and the Genshin Impact gets a small markup of $649.99, but bear in mind all the extras you get. I'm going to bully the Samsung S23, which for the same 258GB memory would cost $759.99, with half the RAM and no massive gulf in performance between the two. I actually think the 12R outdoes it. This is a fantastic price not only for a very good phone but one that comes with a box of goodies.