I have that opinion on both GTAIV and BioShock Infinite.
I was *so hyped* for GTAIV, as GTA:SA was probably my favorite game of all time. I was ready for a return to NYC, ready for a grittier story, ready for this fresh immigrant's tale in New York. When I first got GTAIV, I loved it immediately, the weightier physics were fine by me, the gunplay was fine -- improved from SA though behind other games, but fine, and I was super excited to play it. My initial impressions were high, I thought the story was interesting at first.
But then the more I played it, the more I soured on the game. The world was largely empty, with nothing to do, the story was uninteresting. The main antagonist, far from being the greatest antagonist of any game up to that point (Officer Tenpenny, with Samuel L Jackson's stellar performance in San Andreas), didn't exist in GTAIV. There was one bad guy you were going for for half the story, then you get him, and then... there's another bad guy you're going for. And unlike Tenpenny, who is a constant negative presence in your life in GTA:SA, the bad guys in GTAIV were hidden guys who you didn't know who you were going for... they were Russian mobsters who didn't have a significant impact on your life. The game set it up that Niko has this dark past, that he's in America to take care of business, that there's some mystery there ... but there isn't any, or there isn't any worth remembering.
Rockstar made a wonderfully designed world but... sort of ruined it by not doing anything with it. There was nothing to do anywhere. Entire areas of the map had nothing of interest. No hidden guns, no hidden bombs, no hidden bottles, no collectibles, no easter eggs (or few). Entire regions of the map were barely visited for the main game. The map design was poor too, with annoying choke points and poorly planned routes that you';d have to take *a lot* and they'd terminate on slow moving city streets. The toll system was annoying because it meant driving conveniently through the boroughs required you to get police heat, or "slow down and pay a $1 toll," which the money didn't matter, but it was annoying. Highways terminated into city streets at choke points where if you were going at high speed, combined with the weightier, floatier physics, your car would often get damaged.
World building aspects were removed from the game... You couldn't own property anymore, you couldn't own cars anymore. You could steal and drive cars, but if you stole some fancy sports car, it'd usually get replaced with a floaty white SUV or the taxi or some other crappy car. These were aspects of GTA that they had from GTAIII that they just ... dropped. I guess they wanted to tell a strict story, "Would an immigrant be driving a brand new Porsche?" No, probably not, but an immigrant also wouldn't be heated with 10 guns and involved in this convoluted Russian mob story either, but... here we area. Other aspects of GTA games that were fun for some people, like collectibles and easter eggs, were dropped. Instead of secret drug packages which gave you boosts, they replaced those with ... pigeons... Except killing pigeons attracted police heat in the game, so you couldn't decide to have a slow play session grabbing collectibles because any time you fired your gun, anywhere, police showed up. Likewise, there were police on every block in the game, limiting you from the freedom of other GTA games.
GTA games have always been staged mayhem, but GTAIV took a major step back in other "sandbox" aspects of the game. I still remember beating GTA:VC and using a helicopter to do it where I'd fly back and forth to get health during the last siege of the mansion. Or in GTASA, parking cars in key locations so that my enemies would drive into them, making it easier for me to catch them. GTAIV removed all of that by removing all of your own choices from the world. If you stole a sports car to take on a mission hoping it would help you escape the cops faster on the way out ... the game would remove the sports car and replace it with the generic sedan. This was a key aspect of the GTA games prior, and GTAIV just kinda ruined it. Missions in previous GTA's that gave you some freedom in how to complete them, even if it was an illusion of freedom, that illusion was gone in GTAIV. I realized early on in a street chase down an alley that the guy I was peppering with bullets who wasn't dying ... it's because I wasn't allowed to shoot him. I had to chase him up to a balcony to have a cut scene with him. That sucked. There were a handful of missions that gave you some choice (one where you storm an office and you have some options on how to do it), but they were sandboxy choices, they were basically like "choose your own adventure" binary choices. The end of the game, especially, was hamfisted where you had to choose to kill someone close to you ... It was forced, lame, poorly done, easy to see through. Why should I care?
I don't think GTAIV "was shit," but I think it's the worst GTA since GTAIII. Sure, there were some brilliant aspects like the great physics and damage systems, much better than GTAV IMO. But those are few and far between and don't make up for the steps back.
A lot of criticism of GTAIV came shortly after with people saying "I want *fun* back!" and that often took the interpretation of meaning jet packs or harrier jets. Now, sure, jetpacks and harrier jets were a ton of fun in GTASA, but I don't think those two things skewed the debate because they were the easiest ommissions to point to from GTA:SA to GTAIV. It's not just that harriers were gone... Planes were gone, something that had been in GTA since GTAIII even if the Dodo was almost unflyable. Along with the street layout that had almost no highways and no areas of the map where you could "open it up" to drive fast; that coupled with the world design being conventionally urban, and so there being no natural geography to explore (e.g., Mt. Chiliad in GTASA, or any of the suburban areas, or the vastly different island topography from LA to SF to Las Vegas), it was a world that lacked the diverse experiences of both of the GTA's prior to GTAIV. Along with the strict mission structure, the removed sandbox aspects, and the overall depressing narrative, that got translated into "I want a fun GTA again." GTAV kind of delivered on that, but not entirely. They rectified a lot of these problems, but never quite got the sandboxy-ness of GTA:SA right, and now they've gone off in this weird direction with GTA Online being crazier than even the craziest aspects of Saints Row. So I don't know what GTAVI will resemble.
I've been most critical of GTAIV throughout the years, and continue to be with aspects of GTAV, although I do think that it was better than IV. I have major problems with GTAV as well, though not as many as IV, and neither are as good as GTA:SA. My most persistent complaint with GTAV is that Rockstar hates the people who play their games and are obsessed with taking the piss out of them, and it's bizarre. The entire game seems setup to troll the people who buy it, and I just don't get that from a directorial perspective... like, I don't understand the joy in that. For what it's worth, they don't take that approach with Red Dead Redemption or Red Dead Redemption 2, but it was such an annoying, overwhelming aspect of GTAV, and I just don't get it.
BioShock Infinite I think is just a mediocre game. I had high hopes going into it, but it was mostly hype. What I played was a fairly straight forward action game that had a lot of style but lacked even the basic player choice mechanics from Bioshock 1, and had a story that is honestly non-sensical.