Elevate - Brain Training and Games for iOS

Elevate is a brain-training app that relies on fun yet challenging games to improve your focus, speech, comprehension, memory, and computation.

Pros

Personalization: Immediately after installation, Elevate asks for your training goals. You can select achievements like "Improve your mental vocabulary" and "Process information faster." The app then tests your strengths in different areas and, with your goals in mind, customizes a training regimen.

Challenging games: The games we tried were all very challenging: Estimation, where you quickly total three numbers; Memory, where you complete a partial word, aided by its definition; and Synthesis, where you listen to a lecture and then answer questions. The challenges are timed, which only adds to their difficulty.

Variety: As your skills improve, more advanced games open up, keeping the gameplay interesting.

Do-overs: If you don't do well on your first attempt, Elevate forces do-overs until you achieve a great score, thus encouraging you to keep trying.

Clean, modern interface: The game graphics are well-rendered, and the app's interface is bare-bones and intuitive, with few categories. These include Training, which lists your games of the day; Games, which lists all your gaming options; Performance, which rates your speaking, writing, reading, listening, and math abilities over time; and Settings, where you can upgrade to Pro, adjust your goals, or choose whether you want daily training reminders.

Daily reminders: The daily reminder to train is incredibly helpful, especially if you have a poor memory.

Cons

Lacks research info: Elevate is purportedly built on scientific research, according to the software's App Store page. Unfortunately, there is no evidence of this research in the app itself.

Pay to play: If you're not a Pro member, you get only three varying games per day. If you want to play more after that, then a single game will have to suffice, because that's all you're going to get. Also, several enticing games are open to only Pro members.

Bottom Line

Elevate is a fun, focused way to train your brain with just a little effort each day. But you'll have to go Pro if you want access to more games at all times.

• New and improved content for Adjective Recall, Expression, and Inversion

• Various bug fixes and game enhancements