Those cartoon beat em ups wouldn't kill you over and over again and you could mash buttons blindly. Try doing that in Knack 1 and you'll get nowhere. The game more than most action platformers required you to learn patterns and dodge them. You'd start out fighting a guy with a laser and have to learn to see when he fires and the timing to dodge the laser shot, then you'd fight a guy who does a dash stab that you need to dodge time to get out of the way, then you'd fight both at the same time and have to learn to work around both attacks at the same time, then they'd introduce a third enemy type and mix up all 3 together, etc... it was pretty clever if you like that kind of stuff. The actual attacking was simple punch punch, because the game design was built around strategic defense through the dodge mechanic, the 3 hits kills you with checkpoints far apart and attacking wasn't the important part.
Now that's all Knack 1. I know Knack 2 fleshes out the attacking combat much more with a bunch more moves and abilities, but as long as it's still got the defense timings in, it should be good.
I get most people don't like Knack 1 and it gets trolled all the time, but I thought it was a good, not great, launch title. Moreso than the PS3 stuff like Folklore (although I would've been down for a 10x budget fleshed out sequel of that too). It's way better than Genji was. The combat in that sucked.