Hello,
Orders should be processed as soon as the order reaches the status you set in aworewards->configurations.
For reviews, there is no plugin trigger that says a review has been added. So instead of adding a hack to the shopping cart, we use a poor man's cron to check once in a while.
A poor mans's cron uses normal browser/page requests instead of having to set up a crontab to make request. It requires that your site gets regular traffic/visitors in order to trigger the cron request.