See, I'd argue that the lack of ammo and your character's general weakness is integral to the whole survival horror genre. It's just played differently than the Rambo-style gaming that is the norm. If multiple zombies show up, no, standing up and fighting won't generally work well. So what you do is run, either to plain escape or to lure them to a more confined area where you can take them on one at a time. Luring them to a place where they'll fall onto the ground (at which point you get a prompt for a one-hit melee kill), such as goading them into crawling over a barrier or through a small hole, works wonders. Or you can throw a flare to distract them, and THEN run, or throw a molotov at them since they're all gathered up nice and tight, or go for easy, ammo-efficient headshots. There's tons you can do to fight multiple zombies, you just have to play smarter and more realistically than in most games. It's not really that the player character is incompetent, he's just not a superhero and then enemies aren't immediate pushovers.
Then again I was also a huge fan of Silent Hill Wii, which was similarly divisive. I mean, in that game, you couldn't fight back AT ALL, and I loved it.
