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"The aliens are coming!"

Labeling Save New York as a shooter isn’t really accurate. Sure, the goal of the game is to shoot things. Aliens, to be specific. Black spider-like aliens who are floating down from the sky to invade the fair city of New York. And yes, the hero is a little guy who pilots a little white aircraft equipped with guns. But the game isn’t a shooter. The screen doesn’t scroll; the game is neither a side-scroller, nor a top-down shooter, nor a first-person shooter. But yes, things do get shot.

So how does the game work exactly? There is a screen full of sky-scrapers; the beautiful blue sky in the background with the cavernous tunnels of New York’s subway system below taking up about a fourth of the screen. A never-ending wave of aliens fly from the top of the screen and whenever they come in contact with a building, begin to chow down on it. Gradually, the city begins to disintegrate as comical bite-sized holes appear in the buildings. If a building becomes to holey and unstable, it will collapse.

Your job, as the hero-pilot, is to launch your ship from the bays at either side of the screen and combat the aliens by blasting them out of the sky before they can do too much damage; preferably before they even manage to touch the building. After a particular wave of aliens has been eliminated, the stage will end, damage will be tallied, and a new more difficult stage will begin with more and faster aliens.

The snag is that the hero’s ship has limited fuel. Occasionally a friendly fuel-plane will fly by and drop a canister of fuel, which you must pick up in mid-air before it falls to the ground. In later stages, aliens will actually start to go after the fuel ships.

While this is fun and all, I always found it more fun to play Kill New York. Why fight the aliens, when you can work with them instead? See, the ship’s lasers also take out buildings, and strafing huge structures until they collapse is much more satisfying than trying to pop little aliens out of the sky.

Occasionally, the aliens will lay an egg that will hatch into a baby ground-dwelling alien. This alien is particularly effective because it munches straight through the building at ground level, causing it to collapse immediately. You can either nurture the egg and rejoice in its hatching if you’ve decided to play Kill New York by this point, or dock your ship and travel down into the underground subway system to dispose of the alien with your handheld laser gun. Watch for those subways though. They can be lethal.

There’s so much going on – refueling, eggs, multiple aliens at a time – that one quickly forgets that all the action is limited to a single static screen. If I haven’t been expressing much of an opinion either way on this game, it’s because I want the description to speak for itself. Personally I think it’s a really cool idea, especially for letting you “fight for the dark side” if you so desire. Even if the developers didn't actually plan it that way.


Reviewer's Score: 8/10 | Originally Posted: 08/29/03