How to Defeat Raven in the Tank in Metal Gear Solid

Unless you have a rocket launcher, which is typically rare, tanks present a fearsome challenge, even for seasoned gamers. One of the bosses of Metal Gear Solid, Vulcan Raven, is undoubtedly riding high on his hog, but how should you approach this heavy hitter?

Just when you thought you’d seen it all, now there’s a freaking tank blocking your way to the next area. Don’t panic; this is totally doable; you just need creative tools to take it out systematically. Bring plenty of chaff and hand grenades because this will be a drag-out battle. Also, ignore the petty laughs in the background.

Related: How to Defeat Revolver Ocelot in Metal Gear Solid

Preparing for the Battle Beforehand

The game is friendly enough to warn you beforehand about the mines, so take that opportunity to equip your mine detector and try to collect them beforehand. For those wondering how to collect them safely, you can crawl over them without setting them off and doing so will place them safely in your inventory. These will become useful shortly, so collect all of them on the center and left sides of the rocks. These are the only ones you get, so use them wisely.

Okay, Time For The Boss Fight

It’s a beautiful mess with how this boss fight works. Unless you love nagging your team on the codec, the game tells you very little about how you’re supposed to defeat him. But thankfully, the solution is very simple in concept. Remember those mines you collected earlier? First, you want to equip them immediately and place them around the tank without blocking any paths you’ll need to run through.

The tank movements can seem random, but the programming is always set to move away from you if you get too close and to fire if you get too far. If you use this to manipulate the tank into one of our mines, you’ll stop its tires temporarily, which should be long enough to throw one of your grenades inside. If that doesn’t work for you, a chaff grenade will disable the tank systems and cause them to lose you while trying to come back online. You can use this opportunity to throw grenades inside too, but in both cases, a gunner will still be active, so watch out for him.

After a while, the tank will eventually run out of soldiers. Another trick you can do if you’re having trouble avoiding the mounted gunner is to use stun grenades to give yourself a moment to aim peacefully. Also, whenever you kill a gunner, there’s a window of time where there won’t be anyone manning the turret, so that’s another window of opportunity for you to exploit. Keep it up; eventually, the fight will end as you finally put all this tank nonsense behind you.