Let me put it to you this way, my first time playing through Bioshock I didn't die single time. The game gives you more than enough ammunition, gives you all the tools you need to survive, You never scrapped for supplies. And there's absolutely no penalty to dying if you play the game with all of its default settings because you always respawn at a vita chamber and everything is exactly as you left it when you died so you can just brute force your way through everything.

If it's a horror game, then it fails at being a horror game because there's no penalty. The game can have scary moments but still not be a horror game.

Yea early on you might be a little more strapped for everything, but even then it's not difficult. Going through and playing the game with primarily the wrenche is just as doable it's going full throttle with the shotgun or Tommy gun. If I remember correctly, you can pretty much two shot most enemies with the wrench.

Compare that to horror games, using melee is only a viable strategy if you know the ins and outs of the game. Like in Dead space for instance, shooting at their legs to get them crawling on the ground, using stasis on them to slow them down, then stomping like crazy. Or doing the same thing in resident evil 2, except with the knife. Your melee attacks are always the last resort or an advanced strategy to save on ammunition. But in BioShock you don't ever have to worry about that, you can two shot most enemies with the wrench. And if you can't two shot them, it's not really detrimental to just keep smacking them until they go down. After all, death isn't really much of a roadblock when you just respawn at the nearest buy to chamber and the enemy you were just wailing on is still standing where he killed you.

I don't dislike BioShock. It's a game that I go back and play every now and then because I love the atmosphere, setting, and themes. The game plays a lot of fun. Both BioShock 1 & 2 are some of my favorite games of that generation. But I really wouldn't classify them as horror games. Just first person shooters with horror elements. Probably the scariest scene in the first BioShock was that one flooded room with the mannequins and a single spotlight. Pretty sure just by saying that everyone that's played the game knows what I'm talking about. It's a really memorable scene and shows that if the BioShock developers wanted to make a horror game, they could pull it off pretty well. But horror wasn't the focus for BioShock, which is the reason why moments like that are few and far between.