A lot of software has bad reviews. Recuva in particular gets bad reviews because Piriform, the company that publishes/develops it, also makes CCleaner which has been caught doing a number of shady things. That distrust naturally spills over to their other products.
Recovering a formatted drive is a bit more involved than just searching for deleted files. I don't think this isn't something that anybody is going to do reliably with some off-the-shelf software solution.
The main issue is that formatting a drive overwrites the existing File Table information with a "fresh copy". Whatever it overwrote is now gone, excepting advanced data forensics. This means that, for the most part, recovery is going to get back the files- but you won't be able to get the filenames.
Now, that said, If I had a drive I'd accidentally formatted that I wanted to recover, the first thing I would probably try is
TestDisk. This is open source software, and doesn't try to charge you or have any sort of trial nonsense.
Speaking of reviews, Disk Drill appears to have some particularly bad reviews, With many users saying that it finds "fake" files that never existed on the drive, or finds "random" files and purports to recover them, but they are gibberish.
I've decided to check it out, and ran it on a Virtual machine and was surprised it was able to find hundreds of deleted photos, given I've never put photos on the VM. Naturally, attempting to recover them requires purchasing the product, I suspect this may very well be scamware. I wouldn't trust it based onm what I've seen alone. There are lots of products that attempt to prey on desperate people searching for a way to undelete files or unformat their hard drives, unfortunately, and this approach where it shows you all sorts of files is done because hopeful users will see the photos, or documents, or whatever files and zero in on that and go "ah ha! Those must be the precious photos I lost!/My TPS reports/My pictures of bears with no clothes on/etc."
I suspect they've flooded review sites with positive reviews in some manner. Some of the 5-star reviews don't make much sense. This one was my favourite:
I hired a drone with a card that was not empty. I asked the leaser of the drone about the content in the card. "OMG, that card failed and was I was to erase it. I need the footage on it. Can you save it?"
Of course, I said. I have this tool ... DISK DRILL. I started using the software and I am still amazed. Recovered over 100GB from a 64GB card.
