Flying around NYC isn't as challenging as one might think, and in my opinion preferable to a helicopter tour.
Are you serious??? Yeah, not that challenging if you're flying up the river in a fixed wing not making the mandatory radio calls like the rest of them.
If you're gonna rent, I strongly recommend taking a local flight instructor or pilot with you who knows the river. Then there's the online SFRA course which helps a little, but only gives you the handful of mandatory reporting points, and none of the multiple other points that we actually use. It also doesn't give you any info on the routes the tour choppers fly. Without that local knowledge you'll have the local drivers screaming at you, and probably Newark and LaGuardia as well. It happens all the time, the towers will call us up on the river, asking if we can get a tail number for them of the dumbass that just busted bravo or a game TFR, or wandered up the east river.
Nobody has any business flying up and down that river for the first time on a sightseeing trip with no local knowledge(and that online course is not local knowledge).