mtbr.com:
"...The Rize is a new model replacing the Prophet series. But any comparisons to that previous model shouldn’t be made, as the Rize stands head and shoulders above it (and most other trail bikes). When writing about about how well a bike performs, it’s often best to define what the bike is built for, in the first place. The term trail bike itself is not readily defined. But as a light weight (it weighed 24.7 lbs on the official Mtbr office scale, without pedals) 130mm travel mountain bike, the Rize strikes an almost perfect balance between XC racer and All Mountain bomber.
Its light weight and efficient climbing means that you could race XC with it. Its 130mm of travel (front and rear) mean that you can still bomb most of the rockgardens and jumps that you can on a 150mm travel bike. And the Rize will handle any length of all day epic ride that you can throw at it. More details about just how it rides at the end of this article.
The first thing I noticed about this bike is that the finish on it is beautiful. The white finish with black and red highlights give it an elegant but racey look. And of course, the Lefty Max gets looks anywhere you go (if you are in to that sort of thing.) Even after the half dozen demo days and my rides on it, the bike still looks fresh..
...(snip)....
I have to admit that this is my first time riding a Lefty, any Lefty, and this fork has a super plush feel and ride. At first I was concerned that the fork might be too plush, since it exhibited a lot of brake dive while tooling around the office. However, out on the trail, this was not a problem. The fork operates as smooth as the best of any conventional (two-legged) fork, but is much lighter. While riding, you forget that the fork is single sided, as the stiffness and tractability of it is spot on. The brake dive was not a problem on the trail..."

mbaction.com:
"The Rize is a trailbike that thinks it is a cross-country racer. It is light, responsive, slim and just as effective (and fun) on the forty-minute lunch loop as it is on a six-hour, I-can't-believe-I-rode-the-whole-thing epic excursion. The Rise is a trail bike with a lot of heart."

BikeRadar.com:
"Cannondale’s new Rize is a superbly capable go-anywhere, do-anything 130mm travel bike. If you want just one all-round rig to tackle every sort of riding, this could be it. It’ll handle everything from tooling around the woods to cross-country epics, from 24-hour races to bombing downhill."
“The Rize sort of designed itself,” claimed a Cannondale designer at the bike’s launch in the Canary Islands earlier this year."
"Cannondale knew it needed a multi-purpose bike with a bit over five inches of travel to fit between the Rush and the Prophet in its range. Rize bridges the Rush’s marathon, all-day cross-country slant and the Prophet’s all-mountain hooligan tendencies."
“We already know the best way to achieve certain set requirements for the Rize, so when you add several of these ideas together then certain areas kind of design themselves.”
"Well, that’s the theory anyway, so does it stack up?"

"Ride & handling: may the trail Rize with you"
"My first ride on the Rize was on a 10-mile rocky downhill that dropped 5000 feet with only 500ft of climbing –a real test. If anything was going to polarise my thoughts either for or against this bike, then a ride like this was going to be it. Worse, I was riding the bike with a freshly slipped (and burst) disc in my lower back. Riding was painless but walking was total agony. I had to be able to pedal this bike through every inch of the trail."
"The Rize felt stable, balanced and allowed me to maintain a naturally ‘head up’ stance as I threaded through blind turns at 25 miles per hour. I couldn’t unclip (too painful), so it was feet up, two-wheel drifting. Luckily, I was straight into the groove – the Rize and I ‘clicked’ in five minutes."
"And so it continued to unfold, through slower, loose rock garden sections where the floor moved with you, over high-speed, hardpacked dirt trails, where the bike’s supple suspension was able to stick the wheels to the ground and eke Velcro-like grip..."
"My sole misgiving was the medium-sized frame looks, well, big. I kept on wondering if at some point I was going to get caught out with a top tube where a scrotum ought to be, but it never happened. In fact, the bike melts away underneath you once the wheels are turning."
"The Rize is nimble, and rides lighter and tighter than its weight. I was able to pick it up on the move, mid-turn, and plop it down on a fresh line to make a pass or straighten out another blind turn. Not every trail bike lets you do these things, at least not with the ease with which the Rize let me – even with my dicky back."
"While there was only 500 feet of climbing on the 10-mile trail it was, in keeping with the tradition of product launches, all done at warp factor nine. With international bike journos strutting like bicycling peacocks, being anything other than first up the climbs was not an option. Thankfully the Rize had an another and rather unexpected ace up its sleeve: this bike can climb. All right, perhaps not fast in the World Cup-winning Scalpel sense of the word, but it’s no slug."
"Hit the foot of the climb keeping the momentum high, and you’ll skim up at a speed that’ll thrill. If you do run out of revs and the bike slows and takes its own weight on the climb, the story isn’t quite as rosy, although it still chugs up at a reasonable clip."
"Since my dry, rocky Spanish honeymoon I’ve had our long-term Rize in the wet, wild woods, and it’s been the same story of sure-footed confidence."